"Dental work at children's hospital under GA"

My son had some dental work done yesterday at the Royal Children's Hospital. He has ASD, SPD and is selectively mute. We didn't have the best experience. 

He was given his own room as requested by the dental team due to his special needs which were great and very helpful. I can tell from the noises I heard within the room, the bright lights on the main ward and the number of people, that he would not have coped very well if we were not in his own room. 

Unfortunately, I felt like there was a lack of continuity in my son's care. Every time he was seen by a nurse it was someone different. From the nurse doing the admission checks, to the one that gave premeds, the ones that done obs, the next set of obs, the one that chatted about discharge, the second one that gave us the same conversation about discharge, the one that discharged us, every nurse was different. I don't feel like information was passed on very well, either not written down or staff not checking notes as I was having to repeat myself to nurses and as mentioned above had the same discharge conversation with two different nurses.

I feel like that, along with seeing the doctor, dentist and anaesthetist is a lot for children who are in a scary place feeling anxious, and then having special needs on top of this, it was just too much. When my daughter has an operation in an NHS Lanarkshire hospital it was the same one or two nurses that looked after her and I felt that made her, and myself, a lot more comfortable and was less confusing.

Once my son had his operation the dentist came round to explain how it had gone. Almost an hour later my son came back from recovery, I was not expecting such a long time from him coming out of surgery to coming back from recovery. I was not kept informed by anyone on how he was doing and was extremely worried and almost vomited due to the stress of him being away for so long. If I was told that an hour in recovery was a normal time (previously my children have been in recovery for less than 15-20 minutes)  or kept informed that he had woken up, I would not have felt so stressed or panicked. 

None of the nursing staff were particularly nice, I felt like they didn't have any time for us or really cared about my son. When I pushed the buzzer, as blood was pouring rapidly from my son's mouth and was all over the bed, I was made to feel silly and the nurse just put a disposable sheet protector on top of the bloody sheet and that was it. I cleaned him up as best as I could with paper towels that were in the room.

When it was time for us to be discharged we weren't really given any warning, instead we were told that if he could get up and walk we were allowed to go home. He did this and then we were asked to leave. I phoned my husband to come and collect us (sadly parking is a nightmare at this hospital so I was unable to drive us there myself) which took him around 30 minutes, but after only a few minutes of being told we could leave we were told to leave the room. The nurse told us that we could wait in the playroom, but I didn't feel comfortable with that so we waited outside for my husband to collect us. I didn't feel this was the best for someone who had just had a GA a few hours beforehand. 

The dentist, doctor and anaesthetist were all lovely, particularly the dentist and anaesthetist had a lot of time for him, were aware of his needs and didn't expect him to talk and explained things in an appropriate way for him to understand.