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Long waiting time with no proper diagnosis

Posted By irregularityzs58

"Long waiting time with no proper diagnosis"

About: Chesterfield Royal Hospital / Accident and emergency

(as a service user),

Went to A&E with severe chest pain. Waited a long time to be triaged and in total was kept waiting in the A&E department for 11.5 hours over night.

Chairs are rock hard and close together. Coffee machine coffee/tea is absolutely disgusting and expensive vending machine snacks.

The nurses and Doctors were all lovely, obviously not enough of them but being kept waiting that long in the most uncomfortable way is, I feel,  disgusting!

I went in at 7pm and wasn't given any pain relief until around 2am by which time I was in agony and quite scared.

They only managed to diagnose half the problem for which I'm now on meds but still having chest pain which they didn't find out what it was. They couldn't tell me what caused it and didn't try to find out.

When I went in it said the waiting time was 5 hours, these boards are total rubbish! A living example of me being there 11.5 hours!

All in all the nurses and Doctors were lovely but for whatever reason their waiting times were shocking.

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Responses

Response from Rachel Shepherd, Service Manager , Medicine and Emergency Care, Chesterfield Royal Hospital 11 months ago
Rachel Shepherd
Service Manager , Medicine and Emergency Care,
Chesterfield Royal Hospital

Submitted on 09/07/2024 at 11:41
Published on Care Opinion at 13:01

picture of Rachel Shepherd

Dear irregularityzs58

I am sorry to hear about your experience in the ED.

We appreciate all feedback and look into how we can improve the patient journey through the department and your comments will be taken onboard.

The boards displaying waiting times in the ED are waits to be seen by a doctor and do not display the total time you may need to wait for any investigations (blood test or scans) to be reviewed. That being said, 11.5hrs is a very long time and is far off the 4hours we strive toward and I am sorry this was your experience.

If you would like to discuss further and so that I can look into your individual case, you will need to provide some more information. You can do this be contacting our PALS department on crhft.acs@nhs.net so your details can be passed onto the department.

  • {{helpful}} {{helpful == 1 ? "person thinks" : "people think"}} this response is helpful

Update posted by irregularityzs58 (a service user)

Thank you for your response. In that case your boards are totally misleading.

My Husband has unfortunately been to A&E 3 times over the last few months with heart problems and he has waited at least 8 hours on each occasion. There were other patients when I was there who waited well over 4 hours too. It appears the 4 hour waiting target.is often missed.

Unfortunately it's a sign of the times and not unique to your hospital.

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