Day 10: Downe Hospital

The final countdown has begun for days I will be at Downe Hospital. After today, we will only be going to our placements for two more days because we will be headed to Belfast and Dublin two of the other days. This week at the hospital will be a little different because each day I will be in a different location. Today, I was stationed in Ward 3. Wards are where the patient rooms are. There are three main medical wards, and there are also wards for cardiac patients and day surgery patients. Each ward was set up to be divided into women, men, and elderly patients, but that is no longer the case. Ward 3 was supposed to be for women, so all the bay rooms (which are rooms with 4 beds in them) are only for women, but the individual rooms are for women or men.

When I got there, I met Alison who was the Ward Clerk for the ward and was the person I would be working with for the day. Immediately when I arrived Alison warned me that the ward may be a bit different today. On Friday morning, the hospital had found out that fifteen beds in one of the wards were going to be closed off. This was only days after hearing that twenty-five beds would be closed off in the mental health division. I should also mention that one of the wards in the hospital never actually opened and is just a bunch of empty rooms. Alison then told me that they had just found out this morning that they were going to close the entirety of Ward 3. This means that all those staff members are either going to be transferred or out of a job. She then went on to explain that Ward 3 was the only ward that consistently met or exceeded the standards for safety set by the government. The other wards didn’t meet these standards as consistently because of internal coding errors. I asked why they would close the best functioning ward and was told that it was simply because of numbers. Ward 3 is the smallest ward and it has a total of fifteen beds. Since fifteen was the magic number, it made sense to close an entire ward rather than portions of other wards. There will be negative implications for these cuts because this will likely cause the waiting list period to grow past the nine weeks where it currently stands.

Although there was bad news in Ward 3, I was still learned a few things when in the ward. The Ward Clerk is the person who works at the desk that is by the patient rooms. He/She is responsible for preparing charts for the doctors and making sure everything is there, such as enough papers to take notes on. I also got to learn how to admit and discharge patient’s from the hospital. This was very interesting because there are a lot of codes that go into discharging. Patients admitted under certain codes must be discharged in a certain number of hours. If they fail to be discharged in that time period, there need to be other codes explaining the delayed discharge. If the codes don’t correspond, then the ward manager will get a phone call and need to explain what happened. It seemed like a pretty strict system.

The rest of the day was pretty quite. I spent most of the day just sitting at the ward desk. Alison said that usually the ward is busy, but she guessed that it wasn’t busy because of the bad news. They were already admitting patients to other wards instead of Ward 3. Also, Alison usually does a lot of work in advance, such as preparing admission packets, printing stickers, etc. She didn’t need to do this anymore because she should have enough until the ward closes at the end of June. Since I spent a lot of time sitting, I decided to watch the nurses and doctors. I found out that a doctor only goes to school here for 5 years. They start at the age of 18 and are a doctor by the age of 23. Nurses only go to school from 18 to 21. I must have gone to the wrong country for college!

Because of the lack of activity, I got to go home a bit early and catch the 5:00pm bus with Kaitie and Megan. Then I just relaxed and wrote this blog. We don’t have any plans tonight with Tim, so I’m guessing it will be a pretty relaxed night. I’m hoping to go to bed a little earlier because I was quite tired when I woke up, even though I got a little more sleep.

Well, until later, farewell!