BOSSES at the John Radcliffe Hospital have once again been quizzed on their hospital discharge policy after a patient was ‘wheeled to the main entrance’ and simply left to make his own way home.

Former patient Tom Thacker demanded answers from Oxford University Hospital’s NHS Foundation Trust (OUH) at a recent meeting of Healthwatch Oxfordshire following his experience.

Last year the trust was criticised after another patient, Cyril Tomline, 86, was found wandering at night in the driveway of his Long Wittenham home, near Didcot, dressed only in a blanket, nightshirt and slippers, after he was sent home in a taxi by staff at the hospital.

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Mr Tomline died 16 days later.

Addressing OUH chief nurse Sam Foster at the Healthwatch meeting in Thame last week, Mr Thacker, a member of the Patient Participation Group at Newbury St Practice in Wantage, told how he had been taken to A&E at the John Radcliffe in March 2017, and had been seeking answers from the trust ever since.

He said: “I live alone so I couldn’t drive myself home, I had a sprained knee so I couldn’t take a bus.

“I asked them if they could arrange a patient transport ambulance and they looked at me in absolute horror as if I had started talking Martian to them.

“In the end they wheeled me up to the main entrance where I was left to negotiate with a taxi driver to get home.”

Mr Thacker said fortunately he had his wallet with him and so was able to pay £60 for the taxi back home.

He added: “They made no attempt to find out if I was able to get home.

“If you’ve got family to come with you to look after you all well and good. But I had no family, they didn’t bother to take notice of the fact I couldn’t walk, eventually they just wheeled me out to the taxi rank.

“I could’ve just been dumped there like some of the confused old gentlemen you read about in the newspaper stories.”

The trust, which also runs the Churchill Hospital and the Horton General in Banbury, was unable to provide details of the number of patients who have been discharged from hospital in a taxi, saying it did not hold a central record.

Responding to Mr Thacker at the meeting, Ms Foster said staff must complete a risk assessment before discharging patients from A&E which is done on a case by case basis.

She added: "I would have expected a conversation around 'are you able to pay for a taxi or not', if people are not then the hospital will pay for the taxi but it will come out of the budget of the trust."