"Room for improvement"

My 96-year-old mother had to wait in a draughty corridor for two hours during which time she had her bloods and blood pressure taken, before she was moved to a cubicle. She then waited for a further two hours, with a suspected fractured hip, and only received any attention when she passed out on a commode, when she was manhandled back onto the bed like a slab of meat. When I asked why she hadn't been sent for an x-ray yet, I was told one hadn't been ordered because she had been admitted with abdominal pain and not with a possible fracture; I assume this was because the nurse who had supposedly triaged my mother had never actually examined her or asked her any questions concerning why she had come to Accident and Emergency. At no time during the five hours that she was in the department was she examined either by a nurse or a doctor until she was admitted to the Monitoring Ward, where the staff were kind and caring, asked her what the problem was and ordered an x-ray. Although the x-ray was inconclusive, a later CT scan showed she had an arterial bleed into her stomach and was later admitted to a ward.

I would hate anyone to have the same experience as my mother had. She was not the only one left in a corridor - I counted eight trolleys with people in different states of distress. The problem is clear- too many patients, not enough staff and a failing system, with paramedics having to wait hours to hand over their patients. Nurses seem to have been forced to spend a lot of their time working on a computer instead of spending time tending to their patients. The system needs to change, both for the patients and the staff that work within the hospital.