"Professional, efficient and kind"

This relates to both Accident and emergency reception and particularly my experience of the Abulatory specialist decisions department. I arrived at reception to be greeted by a friendly and helpful receptionist who took my doctors note which was immediately given to a nurse who immediately summoned a porter with a chair who whisked me off to Specialist decisions unit straight away. Once in the unit staff were polite courteous and clearly very busy. The nurse in charge was both professional and excellent managing to answer phones, organise staff, liaise with doctors and keep the whole team on track with actions. The department was clean. The doctor who I saw was excellent, listened to what I said, gave me a full and comprehensive examination and came up with a plan. I felt valued, listened to and for the first time in months hopeful. Of course you can’t help noticing everything that goes on around you when you are sitting waiting, its human nature. There was considerable moaning from people waiting for treatment and quite honestly in my opinion people who were less than courteous to the staff who were doing their best. Generally the whole experience was a positive one. In terms of staff I know people are paid to do a job but what I experienced were staff who genuinely showed a positive regard for those in their care and its that star quality in the staff (including the porters who ferried me about) that should be celebrated. I hope those at trust board level follow an open and supporting culture to those poeple who work so hard to pay their wages. Just one more thing to add. This is a private finance initiative and the porters are contracted by another provider not the NHS. Porters should be given footwear vouchers as I understand they walk over 30K steps a day and please get them a decent polo shirt. Also for the private finance management company, its important that they do something about the dreadful signage across the site and introduce decent standard signage along with colour defined zones to aid navigation and way finding. Other large hospitals have it.