"Brilliant staff let down by poor liaison between..."

Our son underwent keyhole surgery for a hernia operation. After an initial consultation at Broadgreen the subsequent appointment and treatment took place at the Royal Liverpool. We could not fault staff attitudes, helpfulness or skill. Our main dissatisfaction was the series of contradictory information we, as parents received from the time he was admitted. 'He is down as first on the list so should be able to go home about 3pm'. When we rang at 11.30 am this had changed to ' He hasn't gone down yet but will be doing so at 1.30 pm and will need to stay in overnight' . We were disappointed but quite understood that a patient who was more frail may have needed to go first. There followed several phone calls over the afternoon where we were told contradictory things and when we arrived at ward 9C for visiting time we were told that our son was no longer coming to that ward. After waiting for a while we were sent to ward 9B where we waited until 7.50 pm before our son finally arrived from the recovery ward! Fortunately we were able to stay with him till 8.30 when to our surprise we found that he was in fact being discharged that night! All this confusion and lack of communication between staff did not give us a good impression at all. Despite this we were grateful to all the staff for their kindness and politeness.