"nightingale children's ward"

Anything else?

My daughter was admitted through A&E and had a 4 day stay on nightingale ward, our first at Chesterfield Royal having recently moved to the area. Its an emotional time when you child is in hospital but i will try to be objective & constructive in my review to enable it to help other parents and the hospital review less than perfect practices. The ward is spotlessly clean, has excellent parent / child facilities & pretty comfortable reclining chairs for parents to sleep on overnight. There was always a member of staff available for queries during my stay The food was totally acceptable, it may not be the organic diet my daughter is used to :) but she found something to eat at every meal and loved the desserts. the hospital shop is exceptionally well stocked with items i could buy to eat during my stay just using a kettle -cuppa soups, food doctor healthy range etc as well as the obligatory pot noodles and sandwiches) and a daytime take away hot food cafe. My one and only negative (and its a huge one) is the lack of consistancy in care. AT every nurse & doctor change we were given different care and treatment plans. They all seemed to want to stamp their own mark on the way my daughter was treated , often without reference to previous history or my comments which i felt prolonged my daughters stay by 24hours. Quite simply, we were given conflicting care advice daily but as it was our first stay at chesterfield i didnt want to upset anyone by putting a stop to all the changes until day 3 when i finally did through sheer exhaustion and worry. day one we were asked to take one peak flow reading every 2 hours, later that day new nurse wanted it before and after every neb, next nurse wanted it doing 3 times before and after every neb, next one wanted my daughter not only to do 3 readings before and after every neb but also stand up to do it! this went on and on....then the 4hrly rules and 6hrly rules... Until it became apparent to me that my daughter was becoming exhausted, despite my best efforts to try to make it fun she was also becoming dispondant and her sats were deteriorating as a consequence. finally on day 3 a doctor and i had a somewhat emotional discussion and I expressed my concerns over her care, following this discussion my daughters care was changed to only allow necessary obs (thankfully relieving us of peak flow duty) & she improved enough to leave the following day with open access. Looking back on the experience i felt poor communication between change over staff was at the essence, with every new nurse adding their two penneth making it more & more confusing and exhausting until i lost faith in their decision making resulting strained relations between staff & myself which added further stress to an already emotive situation. For my part, i should have expressed my concerns about the amount of peak flow & other readings they required earlier & not assumed 'thats how they do it here' hopefully lessons learnt all round