Mrs B complained about the advice her husband Mr B received from an Advanced Nurse Practitioner (ANP) employed by the Out of Hours GP service, shortly before he was admitted to hospital and sadly died of neutropenic sepsis. Mrs B said that a home visit she requested should have been arranged for her husband in light of his leukaemia diagnosis and the symptoms he had been displaying earlier that day.
The Ombudsman found that the ANP should have arranged for Mr B to have been visited by the district nurses or an Out of Hours GP to enable blood tests to have been carried out in light of his condition and his high risk of developing neutropenic sepsis, although she recognised that this was not an obvious or easy decision for the ANP to make in the circumstances.
The Ombudsman upheld Mrs B’s complaint that the care and treatment provided to her husband was not clinically appropriate. The Health Board agreed to the Ombudsman’s recommendation to apologise to Mrs B within 1 month.