"Great care for an old lady at York A&E"

My mother is 90, confused and lives in a very good nursing home. We took her to York A&E department at the weekend becuase she had suddenly got a painful swollen wrist.

She was seen quite quickly by a very good triage nurse and quite soon after that she had the x-ray the nurse had ordered. The radiographer was also quick and helpful.

We then waited for over an hour watching other younger people who had had their Xrays after my mum, being dealt with by the nursing staff. In the end I asked one of the sisters in charge who explained that because my mother was over 70 she had to be seen by the doctors and could not just be dealt with by the nurses. She was very good at including my mother in this explanation. She could also see that my mother was getting very tired by this time - we had already been there 3 hours - and arranged for to be seen next.

The doctor explained that nothing was broken and that the most likely cause was an infection or perhaps very bad arthritis in the wrist. He took time to explain things and to include my mother.

Overall a pretty good experience - it all took nearly 4 hours and my mum was exhasuted by the end but they were very busy and everyone took a lot of time to explain things and treated my mother with great respect despite her confusion.

Thanks to staff nurses Shirt and Tuxford and to Dr Barhani who were all great!

Two suggestions - it would have been good if the radiographer (or someone) had told us that we were going to have a longer wait than the younger people there - that way we wouldn't have felt forgotten.

And there was quite a lot of dried blood on the floor of the main casualty waiting area which attracted quite a lot of negative comments from people waiting.