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Bad experience in A & E

Posted By zoe13

"Bad experience in A & E"

About: North Tyneside General Hospital / Accident and emergency

(as the patient),

Emergency admission by ambulance for adrenal crisis. The team in the rescus unit within A&E can not be faulted. However, when I was then moved out into the A&E area it feels like I had entered hell.

Some nurses were rude, unhelpful. The noise is unbelievable. A massive desk with so many staff all screaming over the top of each other.

From morning until 7.30pm there were no beds available in the wards. There were trolleys with patients everywhere in this noisy, unbearable department.

I was not once offered anything to drink or eat. I had to ask a porter to please get me some water. I was terrified and felt so ill.

Then to finish things off completely I was left with a Doctor who obviously knew nothing about a patient with adrenal insufficiency who is steroid dependant. Everyone knows that hydrocortisone will clear within 5-6 hours, and this doctor said I could not have anymore because I had an infection.

Transferred out and was given iv hydrocort immediately by a private hospital that knows after crisis you continue with iv steroids until the patient is well enough to take tablets orally again.

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Responses

Response from Annie Laverty, Chief Experience Officer, Patient Experience, Northumbria Healthcare NHS FT 10 years ago
Annie Laverty
Chief Experience Officer, Patient Experience,
Northumbria Healthcare NHS FT

Submitted on 25/10/2013 at 20:04
Published on Care Opinion on 28/10/2013 at 12:26

picture of Annie Laverty

Dear Zoe,

Thanks for sharing this. I was really concerned and disappointed to hear about your very poor experience of the A&E service in North Tyneside. I an deeply sorry that we've failed to provide the quality of care that we'd expect all our patients to receive.

You raise a number of points from the quality of clinical care to the attitudes and behaviour of staff and I'm anxious to act quickly to ensure we learn and improve all we can. I will be passing on this information to the management team but would be grateful if you would get in touch so that I can find out more. My email is annie.laverty@nhct.nhs.uk

Many thanks,

Annie

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Response from North Tyneside General Hospital 10 years ago
North Tyneside General Hospital

Submitted on 27/10/2013 at 09:21
Published on nhs.uk on 05/01/2014 at 23:30

Dear Zoe, Many thanks for sharing this. I am deeply sorry that your experience of our care has fallen so far short of what we would expect for our patients. You raise a number of aspects of the service, from the attitudes and behaviour of staff, availability of beds and the quality of clinical decision making, that concern me greatly. I'm very keen to understand more about your care and the details of the day in question so that we can learn and quickly improve matters where we can. I'd be very grateful if you would get in touch : my email is annie.laverty@nhct.nhs.uk In the meantime I have forwarded this message to our A&E team - providing high quality, efficient and friendly care matters a great deal to them - they'll be very disappointed to learn they failed to get this right for you. Please accept my renewed apologies - I do hope you are feeling considerably better now. With kind regards, Annie Laverty - Director of Patient Experience

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