Dear Jane.........

This post has been sitting in edit mode on my laptop for a few weeks now, waiting for me to tweak it and post it, I find myself sitting in a tiny room in the parent's accomodation wing at 3.55am in the morning, unable to sleep yet again and now I find time to finish this post and update.....sorry for the odd timeline but it's just impossible to write during the day with Daisy, I am either spending time with her or talking to the various doctors and professionals who stream into and out of our lives over the week.  Weekends are for family visits, and night-time is for mulling over what has happened during the day or swapping shifts with Andy................

A week is a long time in the world I find myself inhabiting, and just one week on from my last post it feels like we have moved forward at nano-speed in all areas of our life. I came home for the evening on 5 April and Andy was staying at Great Ormond Street.  At 5.30pm he phoned me to say that one of the Gastro Consultants had come to see him to say that Daisy would not be able to have a slot for the surgery to place a surgical jejenostomy until some time during May.  This was going to condemn her to at least another four weeks in her cubicle, attached to intravenous pain relief, with no feed and TPN running for 24 hours a day....clearly this was not acceptable, what had gone so wrong that we found ourselves in a situation where our childs needs were no longer seen as urgent....

Andy came home on the last tube and we fired up the laptop, opened a bottle of wine and began to write:-

Dear Jane Collins (the Chief Executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital) ...We are writing to register our formal complaint that regrettably after a generally positive  6+ year relationship with Great Ormond Street Hospital we feel that our daughter, Daisy’s care and clinical management is substandard and not supporting the objective of improving the quality of her life...

We described, over the following four pages, the impact of not having a surgical jejenostomy was having on her life and our family life.  How basic processes in communication and patient advocacy had left us in a situation where our family would continue to sit waiting for things to happen for at least another four weeks....four weeks where Daisy was condemned to life on TPN for 24 hours a day and at constant risk of developing infections.

Within 12 hours our world changed, people we had never met before appeared in Daisy's room and most importantly the surgeon who had performed her ileostomy last year appeared in her room to tell us that she had been put on the emergency list for surgery the next day.... by Thursday evening Daisy had her surgical jejenostomy, technically called a roux en y jejenostomy and although she was not coping too well with her breathing post anaesthetic was back on the ward and we could start to think about life away from hospital again...


We are now 2 weeks post surgery and Andy and I have mulled over why did it take a letter to be the catalyst to action.  We are so fortunate to be able to articulate our concerns and to be able to stand back and use our experience as business professionals to look objectively at why processes had failed to support the overall objective of the child first and always.  We have never ever criticised Great Ormond Street Hospital and never will - our daughter owes her life to the care and expertise of the many people we come across every time we come to this hospital.  However some of the basics of communication and ownership of issues are so clearly missing in some areas leading to situations where children wait for procedures and plans to happen.  What was missing in Daisy's case was a clear sense of ownership of the problem and that word which we have used so much recently, advocacy, for her needs.  As her parents we trust that people are fighting her corner when she needs things to happen, in many cases this does happen and we know of some brilliant people who are constantly fighting Daisy's corner. But when your child is so complex and teams rotate on a weekly basis who is making sure that things are still happening when they should?


Our letter of complaint has become a catalyst for a root/cause/analysis of this situation - parents of complex children need to be parents, we are advocates too but we trust that the health professionals are then making sure that they are representing our child's needs among all the other priority children.  Andy and I did not want our complaint to be just about dealing with our situation, we wanted it to change things for the better, to look at where things have gone wrong and make a difference so that situations like ours don't happen. 


We now have over six years of experience of dealing with the machine that is the NHS, over the years our ability to deal with this has grown and evolved.  We have learned that we are essentially dealing with a huge, supertanker set in it's ways, but we have also learned that by finding the right people who can help you can slowly find a voice which people will listen too.  Whenever people ask me how to manage a situation I always direct them to the Patient Advice and Liaison Service (Pals) - every trust has one.  We have a long relationship with the Pals team at GOSH, to the point that we always pop our heads around the door, even to say that things are going well this stay.  Often I will go in and ask them to "liaise on our behalf" - sometimes a carefully worded email from Pals on our behalf is all it takes.  The Pals team know our situation with Daisy and know us, we have only ever used them when things are becoming difficult and are always clear in knowing what we want as an outcome. 


We know we are going to continue to have a long relationship with GOS, many things have changed for the better - the care Daisy receives on Rainforest ward is fantastic, so much better than the early days when we used to come to the hospital, things can improve and we have always taken the view in every aspect of our lives that you can sit and rant about it or you can do something yourself to improve things.  Years of diplomacy and tact pay dividends when you become viewed as parents who have views worth listening to...


So now Daisy has her jejenostomy at last and we are working towards increasing her milk feeds and reducing her TPN down from 24 hours so that she has time off.  We are also making more and more progress in managing her pain and identifying where it is coming from.  For years both Andy and I have been concerned that her pain is not just from her colon but also from her bladder.  Eventually the gastro team organised urodynamics testing which has identified another source for her frequent infections and pain - Daisy's bladder does not empty properly, this means that there is always a residue of urine left in it, explaining the reason behind the frequent UTI's and probably also explaining why she experiences so much pain at night as her bladder fills, goes into spasm and because of the UTI's is chronically inflammed.  The solution is to help it to empty.  The team here would like her to have a vesicostomy, yet another stoma, this time in her bladder so that excess urine could drain into a nappy.  Andy and I have not made that mind shift yet for another big bit of surgery or also to condemn Daisy to a life of incontinence when most of the mobile children with Daisy's condition do not spend their lives wearing nappies.  The second option is to fit a supra-pubic catheter which would allow us to drain the excess urine from the bladder.  This involves another general anaesthetic, it's seen as a medium term solution and in the longer term she would need surgery to provide a more permanent solution to her problems with her bladder.


So at least we have a lot more answers on why Daisy gets so much pain - it is from several sources, the diversion colitis, her dysmotile small bowel and, not suprisingly, a neuropathic bladder.  So you would think that given she is now doing so well establishing her milk feed, reducing hours on TPN and we have a good protocol for pain management that surgery to fit the supra-pubic catheter would be prioritised and we could move forward in our plan to transition from GOS to our hospice for respite before going home....


Well in a remarkable moment of deja vu I received a phone call from Andy tonight (it's always when I am at home and he is doing a shift at the hospital!) - at 5.50pm, the Urology Registrar came to visit Daisy to say that it would be likely that it would be a month before they could do the surgery......somehow I think we have been through this all before....however we have some good people who I will speak to tomorrow and once again in my role as Daisy's advocate point out that sitting in a hospital cubicle, at risk of infection (she is just recovering from a bout of shingles) while we wait for a procedure which will enable her to get home and live her life is not acceptable...


And so that is why I am finishing my blog in the early hours of the morning as I run through the conversations I will need to have yet again later today.  It's not my daughter's medical problems that cause me sleepless nights, these I can deal with, she is strong and a fighter....it's the fighting and battling I have to do on her behalf to get her the things she needs to live her life, that's what saps my strength and energy.


Better close down the laptop now, big day ahead, fingers crossed the next post will be a positive one!

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