What to expect as an inpatient
If you need to be admitted to hospital, this may have been planned in advance or may occur on a more urgent basis. Your first point of contact will be the CF team, who will have arranged your admission for you. Unless a more urgent admission, where you may have been asked to come through the Emergency Admission Unit first, but the CF team will be there also to advise until you can be moved to a CF bed.
All routine and non-urgent admissions are organised into our CF ward, where there are 16 all en-suite bedrooms to avoid cross infection. We also have 4 special infection en-suite bedrooms (2 on ward West 2 and 2 on ward East 2) for patients with Burkholderia cenocepacia or Mycobacterium abscessus. Your care will be coordinated by the multidisciplinary team: doctor, nurse, physiotherapist, pharmacist, dietitian and ward staff, with input from other specialities as required.
Physiotherapy during an admission
This is what you can expect from the CF physiotherapists during your admission.
We will see you within twenty-four hours of your arrival in hospital. This is usually the same day as you arrive but may be the next day if you arrive on the ward in the late afternoon. All CF inpatients will be offered daily sessions in our patient gym and/or walks with our physiotherapy assistant within the hospital grounds. We can tailor any exercise regime to suit each individua patient to ensure we meet the needs of everyone.
At admission we will go through a fill assessment with you. This may include:
- Talking with you about what has brought you in.
- Talking with you about your routine at home & any things going well or problems with the routine.
- Clinical tests like lung function, taking sputum samples and listening to your chest.
- Asking you questions about whether you have any problems that are common in people with CF like joint or continence problems.
- Checking your physiotherapy routine to clear your chest and any exercise that you are doing.
- Checking your inhaled/nebulised medications including any devices and your technique using them.
- Discussing with you what you want to get out of the admission and planning your treatment with you,
- Discussing our assessment with the rest of the CF team so that they know about any problems.
At admission, during your stay and at the end of your stay:
We will aim to see you twice a day. There may be times where you or we feel that twice a day visits are not needed.
During your stay we can:
- Check and if needed, change your physiotherapy for your chest and let you know about any new treatments/devices available.
- Help you with doing your chest physiotherapy if needed.
- All patients will be offered the chance to exercise in our gym area or to have exercise equipment in your room.
- Check your nebuliser and inhaler medications and equipment, make sure that you can use them without any problems and let you know about any new treatments/devices available.
- Test any new inhaled medications with you to make sure that they are ok for you to take and that they are useful for you to take.
- Point you in the right direction for advice if you are having problems that we do not directly deal with.
- Monitor how things are going and work with the rest of the CF team and you to make sure that you get the best treatment possible.
We will make sure that you are seen before you go home and will:
- Talk with you about how your stay has been.
- Talk with you about your regime & any changes that have been made.
- Provide you with a treatment chart detailing your home routine if you think that this would be useful for you.
- Carry out repeat clinical tests like lung function, taking sputum samples and listening to your chest to check how well you have responded to the treatment.
- Check the physiotherapy to clear your chest and exercise that you are planning to continue with at home.
- Look at your nebulisers and inhalers and make sure that you can use them without any problems.
- Make sure that we let the rest of the CF team know what we have done during the admission and what has been planned for home.