People may say that I'm wrong to be angry about this, but it's just so frustrating.
My partner's elderly mother pays for a telecare system, which comes with an emergency button worn on a necklace. You press the button, and it goes straight through to a call centre, and their staff can talk to you via a box on your wall. It's loud enough to be heard in every room in her house.
Twice in the past couple of months, his mum has telephoned us in such severe pain that we have had to call for an ambulance and she has had to stay in hospital for several days.
Yesterday, she phoned my partner who broke off the call to ring for an ambulance and then called her back, and talked to her whilst she was crying out in pain for over an hour waiting for them to arrive. Because the phone line was tied up, the medics couldn't get back in touch with my partner, and had to leave a voicemail which we discovered only after the ambulance had arrived.
Both times, we have asked her why she hasn't used the emergency button which she is wearing around her neck, and she has said that she doesn't like to bother people. She rang her GP surgery, who told her to ring 999. She didn't - she rang us instead and had been lying there in agony for several hours before she even called.
What is the point of paying for the damned emergency button if she won't use it?
Something else that I'm really not happy about - later in the evening, my partner rang the hospital to try to find out what was happening. After being passed around several departments, someone told him rather abruptly that his mum was "in the departure lounge" and then hung up. We assumed that that meant that she was being sent home. One of my friends said that she thought it meant that she was dying.
After a few more calls, we discovered she was actually in the Surgical Assessment Unit, waiting for a consultant. This morning, I did an Internet search on 'departure lounge' and found that it's hospital slang for the geriatric ward - and she wasn't even on the geriatric ward anyway.
I am absolutely appalled that a medical professional would use that term when talking to an extremely stressed relative, worrying about what's happening to his mum.
