"Why are St Johns staff so good?"

As many will know there is much to fault NHS Lothian and I have complained often enough by the poor service they offer in so many areas. But this story starts with high praise.

I have just spent a few day at St Johns hospital and the medical staff and others, by that I mean the nurses, the Allied Health Professionals, the clinical support staff, the domestics and porters, were absolutely the best. Professional, competent and friendly and I only wish I could name a few to put on record my thanks for the treatment I received, made even more amazing given how utterly poorly they are treated by management.

Short staff perhaps only a couple of fully trained nurses on two or more wards which meant alarms from various medical devices going off for much longer than is ideal.

Staff on a twelve hour shift, usually the trained nurses.

Being in hospital is such an observational experience and you can see how much time is wasted doing admin because the likes of Trakcare is still a buggy poor system and it can take far longer than it should to input even the most ordinary of information, blood pressure, temp and oxygen levels. This stuff keeps the staff from where they are needed most and do most good and that is dealing with the patients.

Then we have the ward doctors who seem to deliberately make life more difficult for the nursing staff, I was prescribed medication from to different members of the nursing team, these are passed on to the doctors to be actioned, it took something like 5 hours and a reminder from the nurse before I got one medication and I never saw the other, fortunately it was not needed. Of course the doctors are busy but forgetting to do something is not a valid excuse. It is a running joke on the ward and I suspect on many others that it is necessary to remind the doctors to do something more than once.

Then we have the standards of maintenance, on my ward the main door slammed shut rather than closing gently, a simple adjustment to the door closure is all that is needed but although reported several times over months remains. The bathroom door handle was also coming off again reported but nothing done.

The worst I came on was a patient call alarm staying on for hours, not once or twice but three days on the trot, it is shocking that maintenance is so poor and takes so long another example of how contracting out simple maintenance just does not work.

Finally the bed linen something I have spoken about before, I would not use most of it as a pet bed let alone on a hospital patients beds, it was for the most part threadbare and had holes. Now I appreciate bed linen will face a hard life but you get what you pay for and this is just poor quality.

But this post is mainly about the nursing staff and I cannot praise them too highly, wonderful wonderful people.