"Awful Service "

Our 3 year old was brought into the children's accident and emergency at 12.30am with a temperature of 34.2°C and a low blood sugar level by an ambulance crew, who were superb, but that's where the positive experience ended. We initially had his observations taken and told to wait in reception without being given any real information about how serious his condition was. We had one observation at approx 2.30am where he had improved but then no other checks until 5:40am in the morning after it was requested by us. Which resulted in two nurses checking his temp in quick succesion. One of the nurses who did one of the checks in the morning remarked how his temperature had dropped a bit since the last observation which was good news. We had to tell her he was brought in for a low temperature, so it getting lower was bad news. She replied "oh he's in for a low temperature, I didn't know that" Our son got hungry during the night and the vending machines didn't work, so I asked at reception and she said there was a bowl of biscuits in reception for the kids which was empty and hadn't bothered to be replenished, which to be fair they did replenish after id spoken to them. During the the 6 hour wait, apart from the one observation we did not get asked once how our son was or where we were in the queue or even offered extra blankets through the night and nurses had walked passed us multiple times. I did initially think they must just be quite busy, but once we finally did get seen by a doctor at 6.45am we witnessed all the nurses huddled around the main desk nattering away with each other and us overhearing a nurse asking another nurse if she'd done an observation and her saying how she'd forgotten to do the observation and she was glad that the other nurse had reminded her. Then finally the doctor told us they didn't have the medication in stock and wrote us a prescription which our pharmacy said was written wrong, although they'd did give us a prescription we were told to speak to our GP because of the discrepancy and to make sure the course of treatment was the right amount.

I understand these nurses must deal with a lot, but leaving a 3 year old in a reception area for 6 hours during the night without just popping out every hour or so just to see if we needed anything or just to tell us what number we are in the queue is unacceptable to us. The nurses just seemed to be doing the minimum required to get them through their shift. By 6.30 in the morning I'd had enough and I told the nurse unless he gets seen soon we were considering taking him home because he needed breakfast and a bed and a waiting room wasn't the place for a toddler to be for that amount of time. Within half hour we were seen by the doctor. My brother had the polar opposite experience at Warwick hospital with his son, where he said they were amazing and couldn't do enough for them, so this just isn't the way it is everywhere.