"Communication was lacking in every department that we went to"

My sister was recently very ill. I rang our GP emergency line for advice on what to do and the person that answered the phone told me that was not an emergency.

When we finally got through to a doctor we were advised to go the A&E straight away.

When we got to the Mater Hospital in Belfast she was so weak and needed a wheelchair to get her from the car the reception, I had to leave her in the car and go to reception and ask them for a wheelchair to fetch her in, they just brought me a wheelchair and didn't offer to help me so I had to get her out myself.

The GP had informed the reception that we were coming and that she needed to be triaged, we saw the triage nurse and we were asked the exact same questions back at the reception and then we had to wait to see a doctor who then asked the exact same questions again.

She needed 4 units of blood and was severely dehydrated.

She was then put on a trolley in a bay and she was so poorly that she just slept, I went home and came back the next day and she was still in a bay. They managed to get a bed for her in Royal Victoria Hospital but it took the whole morning to get her transferred. Once there, since she was dehydrated she was encouraged to drink water, but no one monitored her in case she ever needed to go to the toilet and when she did go to the toilet is was absolutely disgusting, there were faeces on all of the toilet seats, it was filthy.

My sister needed a blood transfusion which they didn't manage to do correctly so there was blood everywhere on the sheets, on the floor and on the table she was supposed to eat from. When it did come to eating, they just put her food on the table and left, she had tubes in both of her hands so she couldn't eat any of it and non of the staff helped her or cleaned anything up.

The following morning she told me that she wanted to get out because she couldn't get any sleep due to the noise, it was like a war zone. We were advised she was going to get more blood and then she could go home that night so I went to go pack a bag of clothes and got ready to take her home.

When I arrived back at the hospital the staff member spoke directly to me when next to my sister like she was stupid and wouldn't understand, advising that she could go home soon but would need to wait on the pharmacy to bring the medicine to the ward, I asked them how long it was going to be and they said it would be a several hour wait which meant it could be a middle of the night discharge, so we just made the decision to go home and pick the medicine up the following day instead.

When I was there the following day I was talking to a member of staff about how the pharmacy waiting times meant that people were occupying beds instead of getting discharged quicker, they then asked if we were aware of the discharge lounge, but we were never informed about it.

Communication was lacking in every department that we went to, we had to jump through numerous hoops to try and get my sister well again.

Infection control had seemed to have gone out of the window too.