When you are discharged

To ensure your stay in hospital is no longer than necessary, plans for your discharge are made as early as possible. You should be given a provisional discharge date within 24 hours of admission.

Your nurse will be responsible for arranging your discharge plan. If you have any questions about your discharge plan please see your nurse or ward sister.

Your leaving hospital checklist

When you are ready to be discharged your nurse should make sure you have:

  • a copy of the GP letter
  • all the medications you need with information on usage and storage
  • information on details of care needed from other health professionals
  • information about potential lifestyle changes with appropriate advice
  • contact numbers if you have any further questions or concerns.

You may also need to:

  • give administration staff a forwarding address
  • collect any money or valuables you have handed in
  • return any hospital equipment you no longer need

More information

Your role in your recovery

Once you have had your surgery, your aim is to recover and get back to your normal life as quickly as possible. This will reduce your risk of developing a complication and will take some effort on your part. You are the most important person in your recovery – this is an important statement to remember, as you are the one that can make the most difference. You must listen and act upon the advice given to you by your clinical team.

Patient initiated follow-up

You may be placed on a Patient Initiated Follow-Up (PIFU) plan.

PIFU allows you to decide whether you wish to see the doctor.

Instead of having a follow up appointment booked, your follow up care will be initiated by you.

You can contact the team for an appointment within a specified timeframe, e.g. 6 months, when you feel you need it.

Open and honest care

Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of a number of NHS organisations who want to be open and honest with patients. This is how a modern NHS trust should be – open and accountable to the public and patients and always driving forward improvements in care.

We want to make sure that you can access information about the quality of care that we provide. Being open, honest and answerable to the public and our patients will help us make improvements to our care services. The NHS Open and Honest Care programme helps us to do this by providing you with a wide range of information about our services.

As a member of the Open and Honest Care: Driving Improvement programme, we continue to work with patients and staff to provide open and honest care, and through implementing quality improvements, further reduce the harm that patients very occasionally experience when they are in our care.

We have made a commitment to publish patient outcomes, as well as patient experience and staff experience measures so that patients and the public can see how we are performing.

Each month we work with other care providers to share what we have learned and to use this information to identify where changes can be made to improve care.

Hospital bedside consultation - patient speaking to nurse