"Front line excellent but understaffed..."

What I liked

Kindness, dedication and care by front-line nursing and ancillary staff excellent.

What could be improved

Backup organisation bureaucratic and slow.

Front line staffing is too stretched.

No doctor at the hospital (cf pub with no beer!)

Night staffing so light patients can wait for a long time (45 mins not untypical) for toilet or other attention.

Communications about patients condition/history ineffective when transferred from one hospital to another.

Some internal processes silly - giving patients knives and forks when they are unable to feed themselves - sometimes taking food away assuming its not wanted when patients too weak to eat and need help. Other times just giving patients more food (e.g. special drinks in containers) when previous drinks remain untouched in containers - wasteful!

Anything else?

Visitors especially friends and relations know patients better than staff and can easily detect changes in condition. You can tell nurses but they are understaffed and too busy so comments do not get written up and passed to doctors. Situations therefore develop which could have been dealt with earlier with less patient trauma and expense.