"Pain relief for a child with a broken bone."

My daughter recently broke her arm. On arrival to the children’s ED we were very promptly assessed and she was treated with strong painkillers including morphine and ‘gas & air’. The ED team were great with her and sorted out a temporary plaster cast.

We were told by the orthopaedic surgeon that the fracture was bad enough to need surgery that evening and she was admitted to the hospital. We were transferred from the ED to a ward where the nurses told the porter that they were very busy and not expecting us so we waited in the corridor whilst a bed was prepared.

This bed was in a room with 4 bed spaces in it that seems to have been designed to hold fewer patients. To enter the room, the beds/curtains of two of the patients already in beds had to be moved to the side to allow the trolley into the room as they were positioned blocking the main door. Access to the shared toilet in the room was similar, you had to push past beds/curtains to squeeze into the entrance.

Unfortunately, the surgical team had to operate on a more severe injury first so the decision was made to wait till the next day for my daughter’s surgery. She was very sore by this point as the pain killers from the ED had worn off in the time we had waited to get to a bed.

When we asked some staff about pain relief they were too busy to help and one of them remarked that it was a broken bone so it’s going to be sore.

The staff continued to be busy through the night where not many people in the cramped 4 bedded area were able to sleep as both my daughter and the patient in the bed next to her who also had a broken bone spent most of the night crying out in pain. When they did have time to see to us they gave her pain killers which helped and they were also great with calming and reassuring her.

The next morning she had surgery to fix the bone which massively improved her pain and we made it home later that day.

Every interaction we had with staff when they had time for us was positive. The staff clearly care about the children they look after and provide the best care they can for them. However, despite this, it felt that their ability to provide this care was at times compromised by the strain on the system and the design of the spaces they are working in. The hospital/staff were so busy that providing pain relief wasn’t a straight forward task.

We are extremely lucky to have such a wealth of specialist children’s expertise on our doorstep in Glasgow and I will be eternally grateful to the doctors and nurses who have helped my daughter recover from her injuries.

However, I wanted to share our experiences of her first night in hospital to highlight the implications of the political and managerial decisions that have left NHS services understaffed, underfunded and under resourced.the strain on staff I saw.

When staff are too busy to deal with children crying out in pain it must be fairly demoralising for them.