"They have a long way to go to improve"

I was a patient in this (re-named) hospital approximately 18 months ago when it was still called Millbrook Mental Health Unit. I can only hope that under its new name, it's a nicer, more caring, place now than it was then.

Most of the staff I saw then seemed to be burned-out, irritable, humour-less and sometimes came across as vindictive - it felt as though they held the patients to be responsible for them being overworked and stressed.

I felt sorry for the small handful of pleasant, friendly and caring staff (thankfully there were a few) for having such awful colleagues to work with. I could never do a job like that, with people like them! 

Just one nurse seemed to me to be a "proper" nurse, gently looking after patients with genuine care for their wellbeing. God bless that individual, they are an angel. Another nurse was quite jolly and did their best to cheer everyone up. 

By contrast, it felt like one staff member saw us patients as being captives, no more. 

Some staff did not listen. They rattled through the far-too-short ward round sessions as if on autopilot. They also seemed to disappear from the hospital before 4.00pm every, day and were never around at weekends. Perhaps they worked part time.

Surely a good staff member would modify their opinion based on what a patient told them, but the ones I saw didn't. They appeared to have a pre-conceived opinion, to which they stuck resolutely. They ignored, indeed actively silenced, anything that a patient might try to tell them that contradicted their very rigid unyielding viewpoint. It was difficult to get a word in edgeways with them. What truly dreadful behaviour! 

The dark days of 1930s psychiatry were still alive and well in that place.  Somebody should inform them that they are actually living in the 2020s. A supposed more enlightened time, according to the NHS website, an era where patients are supposed to be shown respect and invited to be involved with their own treatment and recovery.

"Treatment, what treatment?" I am inclined to ask at this point. I was given some tablets to swallow. Nobody bothered to explain to me what they would do, or what the potential side effects might be of taking these state-sponsored (and taxpayer paid-for) drugs.

And that was about it, just the once weekly 15 minutes (if lucky, often less) ward round. No staff took time to speak with me. A staff member once spent just 5 minutes with me, one to one. That's all, despite promises to do more, which were always broken. So I felt I was lied to. Brilliant.   

I just sat around in the ward, reading newspapers or books or watching TV, bored out of my skull. I hardly saw the outside world as there was never a staff member available to escort me for a walk, and the hospital garden was shut, or so I was told by stressed-out staff. 

No activities were organised by staff for the patients, despite the work of fiction about such things on the ward notice board. What a sick joke that was! 

Please tell me: How was any of this supposed to improve my health or wellbeing? I just felt worse every day that I was in that godforsaken hospital. 

What a total waste of money from the public purse!

No wonder the NHS has changed the name of the place recently.

If anything is ever going to improve in this awful, outmoded mental hospital, I think the staff should all be forced to attend obligatory re-training and ordered to vastly modernise their thinking and behaviour. 

They should:

- Treat their patients with respect;

- Not attempt to bully them into accepting an incorrect, hastily-arrived-at diagnosis;

- Be prepared to always listen to their patients;

- Having listened, be prepared to change their opinions of patients, and where appropriate, change or modify the diagnosis. 

Hopefully, this broken hospital might "up its game" and provide the people of Nottinghamshire with a decent mental health service. 

This hospital has a very long way to go to achieve that!