"Department inadequate to offer a paediatric..."

-NHS cuts have obviously led to the adult and child ophthalmology dept to be merged. Our 6 month old was referred here for a eye swelling which we thought was nothing more than a blocked tear duct. To our surprise the consultant picked up on another condition, we are thankful for this however the way this was explained to us and how our baby was handled was not acceptable. We left the hospital feeling fairly confident that the condition picked up was ok and not going to be anything of major concern for our child in life. The consultant said ‘this is very common and nothing to cry about’ (I think he saw me panic when he just said the name of a condition which i’d Obviously not heard of)’ really I should have seen the warning signs when the consultant had to type the name into google to explain... When we got home we researched the name of the condition and to our surprise we found that it is extremely rare and overall the situation hasn’t been explained very well at all. We also found that further steps should have been made to check the overall health of our child which wasn’t even mentioned. We feel that this doctor panicked and tried to put our child’s condition in a much better light than what was reality. In our view the consultants at Scunthorpe are not trained or equipped to treat/diagnose babies or explain things to parents. There’s obviously going to be some emotion when advising a parent that their child has something untoward with their eyes and the consultant shouldn’t then try make things better by not telling the truth. As for the handling of our child, one doctor was very quiet and didn’t know how to bond or engage with a child in order to get their attention, and the consultant was too loud in your face which actually frightens our child. Our child found the whole thing very distressing, when normally he is very relaxed. We have now transferred over to Sheffield children’s hospital and feb experience is fantastic and our child is getting the care required to ensure they have the best start in life. I’m not saying Scunthorpe should be able to offer a service like Sheffield, but I feel strongly that where children are concerned it would be much better to offer no paediatric service than an extremely poor one which we feel it is. I’m sure parents would rather have to travel a bit further to be reassured rather than been left absolutely clueless, shocked and appalled as we did in our situation.