"Importance of proof reading and spell checking"

Our 4 year old daughter passed away last year after a year long battle with a brain tumour. We generally found the care she received was good to excellent and was shared between the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow, Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock and the community paediatric nursing team based at Crosshouse. We were able to spend our last few months together as a family at home where she was most comfortable and that was due to the exceptional levels of hard work from the nursing team and doctors.

The only thing to have let down the care, which we think is worth highlighting as it's very simple to rectify, is the letter of condolence we received from the Glasgow team. We would never want to directly embarrass anyone as it was sent with the best of intentions and the general sentiment was exactly as it should be. Yet it was let down badly on several points.

Firstly it was printed like a letter you would expect to receive for a clinical appointment. Both my name and my husbands were spelled wrongly. The opening line read as if they were telling us how very well they all were - it clearly hadn't been proof read and the omission of the word sorry dramatically changed the theme of the sentence. It was littered with further spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

Finally it was signed electronically with what looked like a faint diagonal line. It's good points were that it was personal and conveyed sadness for our loss, openness for future questions that we may have and personal memories of how our daughter touched them.

Instead of being comforted by such a letter we were mostly annoyed at the slapdash approach. In this case it would've almost been better to have received nothing.

These are easy things to change and make those sending such letters more aware of what this can mean to a family. A hand written card is always going to be the best option by far but we recognise that this may not always be practical or possible so suggest meeting somewhere in the middle.