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[steve6367]

I'm normally a big NHS fan, but do see what people complain about now.

Father  in law taken into hospital and I am sure we get better service at the vets than from the hospital! A lot of it seemed Sunday lack of staff, resources, departments being closed on Sunday's all causing arrival at 1030 and no pain relief or consultant until 1620. What I can't forgive is the total rudeness of the consultant when trying to talk about some of the issues! Ranging from acting as if I m invisible, to go away I ll be with you when I'm ready to no I can't explain anything, why don't you just ask your Dad!

He is there with DVT / suspected stroke so not some minor issue,a few minutes to just talk to patients and relatives is a basic surely? I d be up for a new job treating my customers that way!

Back tomorrow for round 2! 

[Broomies Mate]

Best wishes to your FIL.

It is a shame that PROPER NHS staff are so overworked and underpaid when the fatcats at the top do bugger-all and get 6 figure sums.

Consultant's tend to be arrogant.... I think it's a job pre-requisite.

I'm sure all the Nurses, Porters and other lowly paid staff are fantastic though, and they are the ones your FIL will encounter the most in his hopefully short stay before being discharged. 

[steve6367]

Thank you - things looking up today, seem to be a much better level of service weekdays 

[TheBoy]

The whole thing is so badly mismanaged, with a who-shouts-the-loudest mentality at senior mgmt., it can never be fixed. It needs to be closed down I'm afraid.

Thank god I don't have to deal with those mongrels any more

[Varche]

We are currently dealing with the NHS(Scottish division). Patient is elderly (late 80's) and registered blind and deaf. Each hospital she has been in the last five weeks we have had to ask the staff to write hard of hearing (even with hearing aid which keeps going missing or assembled wrongly) and poor sight on the patient noticeboard above their bed. I personally asked the consultant at Glasgow southern. He stood at the bottom of the bed and addressed her. She just mumbled as she didn't understand what was going on. Fortunately we were there. Afterwards she said what was that about? In fairness the nurse came in immediately and wrote it on her board. Where is the patient care??

In the locaL rehab hospital she is in now the nurse comes in and moans "she hasn't filled her meal request form in for the next day AGAIN". Wouldn't you wonder why she didn't speak with the patient and ask why? Maybe she would then spot she can't see without her magnifier (on her bedside table) or hear.

As far as the brain operation was concerned we have nothing but praise for the skilled consultants in Glasgow. They took us to one side and said without the op she will die. With the op at her age she will likely die. What do you want us to do? All that was very sympathetically put. They offered us a room in the hospital that night but we elected for a local hotel and they said they would call if we needed to go in. She pulled through but some of the others there that fortnight did not sadly.   

One other moan I have is no WiFi  for visiting relatives.  There was one and the ward staff have the password posted up BUT it didn't work. Despite enquiries no one could say why. Why was it important? Well with an average commute of three hours each way plus visiting it meant evening and mornings were taken up for two weeks with endless friends and relatives enquiring on her well being. If we could have Emailed it would have helped with that and other problems with adifferent elderly relative possibly needing to go in a care home. Just thought of a positive. His doctor visited and gave us his opinion on a preboked mobile phone call on the way to the hospital. Top marks for the GP. So not all bad.

[aaronjb]

I don't blame the NHS staff for this one at all, but the whole system is now so .. hopelessly broken.

I visit my GP complaining of .. erm, rear end trouble, as he would say.  Eventually he refers me to the local outpatients department as he's out of ideas.

I visit the local outpatient department in Bracknell who take the symptoms again and decide that a colonoscopy is urgently (well, within two weeks) required.  Soo this could be serious, I suppose..

The GI dept at Wexham Park call me as they have the most availability and book me in for the 25th of November.

On the 17th of November the letter turns up from them stating that I need to have a blood test before attending and also that 7 days prior to the appointment they'll send out the pills that will make me crap out my insides*. Said pills haven't turned up yet, but..

So I call the GP as it's much easier to get to him than Wexham park and, due to work, at this point I can't get anywhere until next week anyway.. When can the GP do the bloods? The 1st of December.

So it's back on the phone to the GI people who re-book that appoint for .. the 15th of December. Argh, so much for urgent!


Only about 10 months since I started asking the GP why I intermittently .. I'll stop there in case anyone is eating dinner.


(*My words, not theirs )

[Varche]

There was a senior NHS bod on breakfast news today and he said the NHS could cut out a lot of waste. I agree.

There ought to be a full scale excercise carried out by every department to look at waste. Things like missed appointments and organising folk to take at short notice missed appointments. (on that subject missed apps should maybe be charged for).

Everybody ought to ask how much time each day do I spend on failure work i.e. if someone had done their job properly I wouldn't have had to do this. Then they could look at the key areas that crop up time and again and fix them.

In your case aaron maybe GPs ought to organise everything for their customer (you)? Would need more staff at GPs

We had a similar thing with the aunt in Scotland and only through our various phone call interventions was her hospital app able to go ahead. To do with Warfarin levels and blood tests. Without that it was doomed to fail and be yet another missed/lost app.

One other thing they ought to do is have the consultants visit local hospitals (travel heaven forbid) rather than make most of the patients for that day travel huge distances. Particularly a problem in Scotland.

[aaronjb]

In your case aaron maybe GPs ought to organise everything for their customer (you)? Would need more staff at GPs

I think in my case they should really have just followed their "normal" procedure - as the letter indicates they would normally send you the letter requesting you book for bloods and then you call and book the colonoscopy.. In my case they booked the colonoscopy first (14 days out from my seeing the GP, which equated to 6 working days after I received the letter) and then expected me to be able to book a blood test soon enough in the interim that they would have the results a week before the colonoscopy..

Someone somewhere isn't very good at maths

I suppose if I was out of work then I'd have been able to get the letter on Monday and walk into the hospital on Tuesday for the blood work.. but alas, I work, and sometimes work schedules can't be ignored (as in the ISO audit happening tomorrow & friday that rules out getting the bloods done this week, even at the hospital) - although I would very much rather have this appointment sooner rather than later and find out if my problem is serious (polyps, IBS, crohn's etc) or very serious (bowel cancer) or maybe nothing at all (unlikely, given the symptoms).

[Gaffers]

I don't blame the NHS staff for this one at all, but the whole system is now so .. hopelessly broken.

I visit my GP complaining of .. erm, rear end trouble, as he would say.  Eventually he refers me to the local outpatients department as he's out of ideas.

I visit the local outpatient department in Bracknell who take the symptoms again and decide that a colonoscopy is urgently (well, within two weeks) required.  Soo this could be serious, I suppose..

The GI dept at Wexham Park call me as they have the most availability and book me in for the 25th of November.

On the 17th of November the letter turns up from them stating that I need to have a blood test before attending and also that 7 days prior to the appointment they'll send out the pills that will make me crap out my insides*. Said pills haven't turned up yet, but..

So I call the GP as it's much easier to get to him than Wexham park and, due to work, at this point I can't get anywhere until next week anyway.. When can the GP do the bloods? The 1st of December.

So it's back on the phone to the GI people who re-book that appoint for .. the 15th of December. Argh, so much for urgent!


Only about 10 months since I started asking the GP why I intermittently .. I'll stop there in case anyone is eating dinner.


(*My words, not theirs )

Sounds similar to the experience I had getting to the bottom (pun intended) of my health issues.  It only took 4 years to diagnose me with Crohn's (in the end discovered duiring a 30 minute colonoscopy procedure) during which time I realised retrospectively that the hospital trip I had 2 years prior was likely a stricture in my bowel and I ran a serious risk of death due to the fact I was misdiagnosed and thus mistreated.

Dont be passive about their shortcomings, they dont give a cr@p (intended again) about urgent or not, each consultant gets about 20% 'urgent' case referrals a day so in the end it becomes the boy who cried wolf.  If it is really urgent then the GP gets a hold of the consultant directly. 

Back up your frustration with a continuation of negative symptoms and pain, it's getting worse, etc, etc.....and good luck

[aaronjb]

Thanks - yep, you're right, the only way to get anything done does seem to be to keep pestering people.. in fact that's how I got the referral to the outpatients dept in the first place as the referral the GP promised me in the first place never materialised.

At this point I'm wondering how much quicker things would have gone if I'd asked for a private referral and used my BUPA cover instead..

[Turk]

Suspected stroke...and that timescale involved !?!   The sooner a stroke is identified and treated is critical   

[cnj]

thought my previous gp was retired not promoted !!

[Shackeng]

There was a senior NHS bod on breakfast news today and he said the NHS could cut out a lot of waste. I agree.

There ought to be a full scale excercise carried out by every department to look at waste. Things like missed appointments and organising folk to take at short notice missed appointments. (on that subject missed apps should maybe be charged for).

Everybody ought to ask how much time each day do I spend on failure work i.e. if someone had done their job properly I wouldn't have had to do this. Then they could look at the key areas that crop up time and again and fix them.

In your case aaron maybe GPs ought to organise everything for their customer (you)? Would need more staff at GPs

We had a similar thing with the aunt in Scotland and only through our various phone call interventions was her hospital app able to go ahead. To do with Warfarin levels and blood tests. Without that it was doomed to fail and be yet another missed/lost app.

One other thing they ought to do is have the consultants visit local hospitals (travel heaven forbid) rather than make most of the patients for that day travel huge distances. Particularly a problem in Scotland.

He might have been referring to Aaron's 'situation'.

[Terbs]