"Great clinical staff, but understaffed and…"

My partner and I have been coming to Barnet Hospital for the past 7ish months for acute and emergency care during our pregnancy. The doctors and nurses have been extremely caring and attentive, but there have consistently been shortages of doctors every time we have been admitted to this hospital, which has made the service frustratingly sub-par.

One example of this inefficiency we've had to wait over 2 days for an routine prescription for iron supplements and antibiotics to be signed off by a doctor which led to a bed being taken which would've been better used for a more severe patient who was probably kept waiting in the triage area all the while they deterred us from self-discharging nor would write a prescription to our GP the next day.

It breaks my heart to write this as I know the staff, both administrative and clinical, work hard and go the extra-mile, but the gross mismanagement from the higher ups is causing a knock-on effect that's leading to burnt-out staff, compassion fatigue, resources being misallocated and patients suffering a symptom.

I don't mean this as a scathing endictment of the hospital, but more of a wake-up call for improving hospital performance and, maybe, even the service as a whole. A good start would be to recruit more doctors so that the hospital doesn't get so easily overwhelmed as it so frequently does.