"Gobsmacked at the poor treatment"

Staff attitude

Our daughter had a tonsillectomy at Kirkcaldy's Victoria Hospital in Fife a few weeks ago and we had a mixed and concerning experience on the Paediatric Ward.

The play nurses were absolutely wonderful and worked very hard to explain everything that was going to happen during a tonsillectomy so that our four year old daughter could understand it. They sent us home with material to show her as well and she remembered a lot of what they taught her during our pre-surgery consultation. Unfortunately, those play nurses and the surgery being over and getting to go home were the only good things about the experience.

No one else we saw knew how to interact with young children to the point that their actions and choice of words were counter-productive. On the day of surgery, which was a Saturday, there was a single nurse on the ward and she had two rooms filled with children having a difficult time pre and post-op, making all of her interactions quite stilted and brief. This is not a good start for a four year old whose anxiety grew severalfold as the adults who were there to provide her with medical care became more rushed and dismissive.  One of the play nurses that she had met was thankfully there on the day to help keep our daughter distracted as we moved into theatre.

However, we only met one anesthetist in the ward before theatre, they acted as though they had never met a four year old before - expecting our daughter to read to them - and then when we went to theatre, there was a second masked anesthetist we hadn't met, which made our four year old pretty fearful. When they put the cannula in, our daughter cried and said "It's sore, it's sore" and the first anesthetist replied brusquely that it is not sore, completely brushing off her feelings, which only made her cry harder. After surgery, once she was back on the ward and it was time to take out the cannula, the same thing happened with a nurse. Our daughter got scared about the nurse pulling the cannula out and said it's going to be sore, it's going to be sore and the nurse responded harshly talking over her say it is not sore, it's not sore. Once again, belittling her feelings because I feel this member of staff didn't have the skillset or emotional regulation to handle a small child who was feeling scared.

I was gobsmacked that my daughter got the same poor treatment from two people trained in paediatric medicine who I believe seemed to have no knowledge or training in working with young children, who are naturally more emotive and have less of an understanding on what to expect in novel situations or environments, such as having a major surgery in hospital.

Modern child psychology promotes validation, from a parent or carer, as a cornerstone of emotional regulation in young children. Not only did my child's feelings get invalidated by multiple staff members when she was feeling at her most vulnerable in hospital, but the ineptitude in dealing with a four year old child exhibited by multiple staff on a paediatric ward begs the question: are staff of this hospital getting sufficient training on the psychological care aspects of their role?

An environment where invalidating a small child's fears is normalised is not something any parent would knowingly subject their child to and this should never have been an environment which was fostered in the paediatric wing of a hospital. I would expect that Victoria Hospital includes contemporary training in providing emotional support to patients as a part of their staff CPD, particularly for the most vulnerable patients, such as children and individuals with disabilities. But, I have lost faith that the individuals responsible for providing care at Victoria Hospital have the capacity to provide the correct level of care for those most vulnerable of the population.