"Waiting room chaos and long waits"

I was recently sent to A&E by Dalriada Doc service with suspected sepsis post major surgery. I was in a lot of pain and was vomiting. I struggled to walk and had to use a wheelchair.

The waiting room was chaos with patients having up to 4 people there with them taking up all of the seats. There were people eating food and literally having picnics. It was noisy with tablets being used with no head phones. There was almost a party atmosphere. I was struck by how unsupervised the waiting room was with so many people not being the putative patient and by how hard it was to be so ill amidst so many seemingly well people.

It was only when people saw me vomiting and needing the support of my husband that they lifted bags of seats to let him sit down beside my wheelchair. Can they please be some way of limiting the number of support people ill people bring into the A&E waiting room? Also could minor illness patients and very ill patients have different spaces somewhere to wait? It was very difficult being so ill in that party like environment. 

I was triaged within half an hour and taken in for blood and ECG. I was then sent back to the waiting room to wait - I was there for hours before eventually seeing a doctor who told me they thought I had bowel ilias post surgery despite me telling them that I had had this but my bowels were working fine.

My large scar was healing well on the outside but I had a high temperature, was vomiting and in a lot of pain - I was 10 days post major surgery. I eventually got a scan (wonderful care by the radiographer) and then had to wait several hours on a A&E chair badly needing anti sickness meds and pain relief which I had been told I would get several hours before hand. After several requests I got these meds.

The A&E doctor gave me no feedback from my ct scan and 3 hours after it, a surgical doctor examined me and said I needed to be admitted - such relief - but that took from 6 pm to almost 1am. Surely with my history and presentation the surgical doctors should have been called to assess me much earlier? 

I dreaded going back into A&E. It is like an endurance test to survive it until you get to the other side of the doors to the safety of a ward. Yet again chaos seemed to prevail both in the waiting room and in the A&E department. It must be so hard to work there and my heart went out to the overworked staff.