"Gastro 5* AMU Not good. Food Bad"

A family member has just been discharged after a second admittance in the space of a month to the Royal Blackburn Hospital. I would like to say first of all that the staff on the Gastrointestinal Ward were excellent. They carried out all the necessary checks and arrived upon a course of treatment which is thankfully now working. However I was not impressed with the AMU. This is not a specialist ward. Its the ward onto which people go when they are first admitted before being moved onto other wards but I can't help feeling that if they had carried out one or two very basic tests, my family member would not have been in such a severe state when eventually admitted to Gastro. The medication she had been put on when previously admitted wasn't working and her condition was getting worse. A blood test to look at inflammation markers would have shown this. We repeatedly told staff that she was in very severe pain and was passing large amounts of blood. Neither of these things were seen as particularly urgent which led to her being in AMU for a week. A week during which Gastro could have been working on making her better. When she eventually got admitted to gastro, she had appendicitis, gastritis and severe inflammation up both sides of her intestines. The gastro consultant was a little dismayed that she had been passing blood in large amounts for the duration of her stay but there was no record of this in her notes. The third thing which I wish to comment on is the hospital food served to patients. My family member has Crohns disease (and by this time a very severe flare up of the condition) this requires her to have a low fiber diet. (Confirmed by the consultant and dieticians) She had also lost a lot of weight and needed to regain her strength yet more or less every meal delivered from the kitchen contained things she could not eat. One meal was just chips and a piece of cauliflower. - not cauliflower cheese, just a piece of cauliflower. One meal was a jacket potato and a scoop of mashed potato - nothing else on the plate, just two servings of potato. How is any one supposed to regain strength and get well while eating things like that?