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Poor poor communication and bad experience...

Story from nhs.uk

"Poor poor communication and bad experience..."

About: Great Ormond Street Hospital Central London Site

I have already sent a formal complaint in a few weeks back but feel other parents need to know this.

To say we are extremely dissatisfied with great ormand street is an understatement.

We had every faith in this hospital from the beginning after the reviews you see on tv etc. My son is 10 months old and had his surgery cancelled twice after making him sit around a ward all day long not having any food or drink.

We never recieved any letters regarding appointments and getting hold of any department is harder than getting hold of the queen! No one gets back to you.

My sons surgery has finally gone ahead and he is currently in the hospital as we speak on the bear ward. We have had such a bad experience on this ward regarding commutation between doctors and even on one occasion we had a Doctor and surgeon having a full blown argument in front of us over our son and his condition. With the surgeon trying to get us involved about how un professional the doctor has been!!

Our son is left on his own, pretty much most of the time and on serval occasions we have found him standing up in the cot hanging off the tv placed inside his cot. Which is a danger when he has a chest drain and varies over wires attached to him. Not mentioning the telephone cord attached to the tv.

All the doctors say different things all the time and it leads us confused and emotionally upset.

Today our son needed an X-Ray and echo. We were first taken down to X-Ray by two nurses and were left there as they were more concerned about having there lunch break. We then returned to the ward to then be sent down again by the head nurse in charge who just said "can you go down to ultra sound"? We were left to detage all his wires on our own!! And go down to the scan by ourselves with a child in pain.

The noise in the bear ward is ridiculously, we understand it's a children's ward but it's not the kids most of the time. It's the parents and the staff.

Our stay is still not over at great ormand street, so there could be more to come. But to say we are highly disappointed in this hospital is an understatement. This is not only an NHS hospital but a charity funded hospital who you expect better service from.

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Responses

Response from Great Ormond Street Hospital Central London Site 8 years ago
Great Ormond Street Hospital Central London Site

Submitted on 15/10/2015 at 12:10
Published on nhs.uk on 18/10/2015 at 02:34

Thank you for taking the time and effort to detail your experience of our hospital. We appreciate that this must have been distressing and so we value your help in improving the care we provide.

We are very sorry to read about your poor experience of booking and being admitted to our hospital. We regret that your son’s operation was cancelled and we hope that the Formal Complaints process will help address these concerns. You have also raised a number of other concerns that we want to help you with. Firstly we would like to assure you that these concerns have been raised to our senior staff and we are working right now on how to best to improve these experiences for you and other patients.

We have shared your experience of communication from the doctors with the Clinical Lead and he will be addressing this with the doctors on the ward to help improve this for our families. We are very sorry that you overheard these discussions and regret any distressed caused. We have also asked for the TV and phones to be reviewed by our Health and Safety Team to ensure our patients are safe.

We want our patients and parents to be confident when going for tests across the hospital from our wards so we apologise that you felt unsupported. The Ward Sister would welcome the opportunity to know more about this experience to best help us learn and improve. Also, we would encourage parents to notify their child’s nurse if they believe that their child is in pain.

All children are regularly assessed for pain by the nurse caring for them, but of course parents are the expert in their child and may notice signs of pain which are less obvious or traditional, and therefore are less likely to be seen by someone who does not know the patient well.

Bear ward is a very busy ward, and that this can be loud at times.

Nursing staff try to encourage families to keep the noise level down where possible.

We very much want to learn from your experience and so would like to offer the help of the Patient Advice and Liaison Service (Pals). They are available in the Main reception, can come to the ward or can be contacted on 02078297862 or emailed on pals@gosh.nhs.uk

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