"My son's ED attendance"

My son recently attended ED in the Causeway Hospital. He had been unwell for 4 days with temperatures, vomiting, shivering fits and feeling generally exhausted and unwell.

He had taken medication for as long as he could and then on advice from out of hours doctors he was told to attend ED.

The nurse triaging him was very rude and told him he should not have come to the hospital without testing himself for Covid as he most likely had it. The nurse told him he was clogging up the system and shouldn't have been there. His temperature was normal during triage, at which the nurse told him that his temperature was fine, this was most likely because he had taken medication an hour before attending the department.

As it turns out after bloods, a CXR and urine test, he had both a chest infection and a kidney infection and required antibiotics.

As an NHS worker myself, I am appalled at how he was treated. He was very genuinely unwell and had followed all the advice he had been given prior to attending and had no choice but to go to ED.

No patient should be treated like that on arrival. It was unprofessional of the nurse to assume they could diagnose him from purely his symptoms and left him feeling that he should have left the department immediately. Thankfully he stayed on and received the antibiotics that he clearly required