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Patients accompanied by their Carers or Personal Assistants

Reference: 24-25507

Date response sent: 18/02/2025

Details of enquiry

  1. Does your hospital trust allow patients to have their Personal Assistant/paid carers assist them in hospital settings?
  2. Does your trust have a protocol or policy in place regarding Personal Assistants/paid carers assisting with complex care needs in hospital settings? What is it?
  3. Does this policy apply both to admissions as well appointments and treatments as a day patient?
  4. How many times in the last 3 years has a patient had their care needs met by their usual PAs/paid carers whilst in hospital?

Response sent

In order to assist with your contextual understanding of our responses below, please note that the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is a small specialist outpatient mental health Trust, with a focus on training and education, and not a hospital. The services we provide are listed on our website here:  Services – Tavistock and Portman

We provide outpatient, and mainly psychological services via talking therapies. We do not provide acute services, nor inpatient patient services, nor detention facilities, and do not have an A&E department.

It may be that your request is not applicable to this Trust, as we are not a hospital, so the term ‘hospital settings’ does not apply to our clinic environments, however we have done our best to answer your questions, as below

  1. Does your hospital trust allow patients to have their Personal Assistant/paid carers assist them in hospital settings?

See above note.  We are not a hospital, and can confirm that, subject to patient consent,  our outpatient service users may have their carers/personal assistants accompany them at appointments.

  1. Does your trust have a protocol or policy in place regarding Personal Assistants/paid carers assisting with complex care needs in hospital settings? What is it?

Not applicable.  We do not have such protocol, and we only provide outpatient appointments in clinic environments and not hospital settings.

  1. Does this policy apply both to admissions as well appointments and treatments as a day patient?

See our response to Q2 above.  We only provide treatments to day patients.

  1. How many times in the last 3 years has a patient had their care needs met by their usual Pas/paid carers whilst in hospital?

We do not hold this data for our day patient environments.

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