"Medway hospital totally inadequate !"

My wife's aunt fell ill whilst staying with us for a short visit, but her condition deteriorated rapidly to point of complete helplessness & almost incapacitated. Following several doctor calls, paramedics and even a trip to A&E it was almost impossible to get her into Medway hospital for proper diagnosis, treatment & ongoing care. Whilst her condition didn't meet Medway hosp strict A&E terms. her condition was very serious and she needed to be admitted into hosp but Medway hosp service fell far too short in recognising this and instead were only willing to send her home with a referral (18 weeks+) for a neurologist to assess. Utterly useless. As her condition slowly worsened further an emergency doctor visited the next night attempting to directly admit her to Medway hosp only to be told they can't accept any more patients and we were left with the promise of being seen the next day with a hospital appointment. Needless to say, staff were unable to honour the appointment at the 10:30am time arrange with the emergency doctor the previous night so my wife and her sick aunt are now stuck in the wards waiting room.

Medway hospital service is utterly disgraceful and completely unacceptable. There is no acceptable excuse for this behaviour or substandard level of duty of care. Her continuous uncontrollable shaking and deterioration in sight meant that she was unable to walk & talking was difficult, and any normal person would have no doubt that these symptoms needed hospitalisation.

Medway A&E are totally failing in their duty of care to recognise someone needing or escalating a patient to another ward for treatment & care where it may fall outside of life threatening emergency treatment.

They simply should not be able to turn people away like this.

Medway hospital is already under special measures by the Care Quality Commission, but are apparent due to exit these special measures very soon, but quite clearly they are still failing and falling well short of even a satisfactory level of care, and therefore these special measures should remain I'm place until patients surveys dictate good levels have been attained!

Conclusion: Medway hospital is still failing patients even after 18 months of special measures and nothing appears to have changed on the surface. It's as bad as it always was.