"Still awful"

My daughter had to visit A&E last night with extreme difficulty with breathing. After an initial set of obs she was then left to sit an ever emptying waiting room for four hours without any further contact from the medical team and had to approach the desk in tears to ask when she might be seen. She was then told to go around to the triage team and ask for one of the nurses (with both the receptionists looking confused as to why she had not been seen yet.) There were no staff around, and many of the cubicles were empty meaning she had to go looking for a nurse. Eventually she found two nurses in an office who told her that the wait was around 8 hours and they'd see her as soon as possible. She was then called back from the waiting room a minute later, where the nurse seemed very dismissive of the breathing issues until she realised that no obs had been done since 9pm (by this point it was nearly 3am.) No peak flows were done, and it took quite a push from my daughter to get the nurse to listen to her chest. After a moment of consideration the nurse finally gave my daughter a salbutamol inhaler which helped to resolve the breathlessness in minutes, meanwhile all the time trying to make out that this was COVID related.

This is entirely representative of my own experiences with Heartlands A&E where I too have been left in an empty waiting room, then met with confused looks by receptionists when I asked when I was going to be seen after several hours of waiting - only to then be told to head round and see the triage nurse "through the double doors" where none was to be found.

Sadly as a family we have now found the A&E team at Heartlands to be distinctly lacking in organisation, co-ordination, management, or compassion. As an ex-nurse, it horrifies me more that this lack of care carries on in this day and age.