Worthing Hospital 2021-05-12 Person 3 5 0

I am unable to answer the above questions properly as I was not able to be with my elderly mother who was admitted in January from Covid.I also live in Scotland and was her main carer visiting every month before Covid lockdown occurred.. My mother was only in hospital for 24 hours and as far as I am aware the nursing care was excellent but the communication was terrible and I was only able to speak briefly with her just before she died. Unfortunately I was told by a male person in A&E that I was not allowed to speak to her as there was no phone! As there were no beds for her she was in A&E for a long time. When she was moved to emergency floor Zone B I did telephone to speak to her but again was told she was being moved to another ward so this was not possible as they were in the process of moving her. My brother who lives in Copthorne was told he could visit at 4pm as she was very unwell. He then had a phone all to say he could not visit due to Covid being highly infectious. On arrival to Buckingham ward 30 mins later he was telephoned and told he could visit her at 6pm. Unfortunately she was unconscious when he visited and died 5 mins after he arrived. He said the nurses were lovely and were sitting with her which has helped us . I did speak to the patient liaison team as, as you can imagine I was very upset by the poor communication and as a retired palliative care nurse felt the communication should have been better and that the experience phoning A&as was unacceptable. I did speak to the ward manager on both A&E and Buckingham ward who understood my concerns and they were most helpful as were the patient liaison team.. I also had a miscommunication with the Chaplaincy team as I had asked them to see her as her faith was very important to her. Unfortunately the 2nd message I left was not picked up until the following day by which time she had died. I had been told by switchboard that the chaplain on the Sat afternoon was not answering their bleep so a message was left by me on their answer phone. I did get a phone call from one of the chaplains afterwards to apologise. So as you can read it was a journey of poor communication for us and maybe we were just unlucky as I hope this does not happen to anyone else.