"Adenotonsillectomy 6yr old."

We found the services of this hospital to be amazing, a real credit to the NHS. Or son had this surgery on the Woodlands unit & recover on the Hedgehog Ward.

The treatment of us all by the staff was first class. All members involved in his care were very informative, each member spoke to us in turn and asked if we had any questions, answering clearly anything we came up with.

The actual operation was handles smoothly and quickly, and the after care and monitoring and regular observations cannot be faulted in anyway.

We likened the experience to going private.

The facilities and the room he had to himself were indeed very clean, very well and again first class.

He was given food, drinks, and medication regularly.

Our only concern, thus the slight lower rating for staff communication and being involved in care is that lack of consistency in decisions.

At the pre-op assessment we had been told we would as standard receive a small amount of a controlled drug to manage his pain upon leaving the hospital to use in addition to the standard pain medication if and when things got bad.

Upon being discharged we were given a good supply of pain relief however no mention of the controlled drug.

We ourselves asked where it was to be told the only GP who could prescribe it had left fro the day and done the ward prescriptions but had not know about our operation, that some doctors don't use it anyway and if we think we need it we can get it from our GP.

So if we had been discharged earlier, he may have had the prescription, that's annoying.

Then to attempt to get it from the GP the following day, who said they'd never heard of children being prescribed this having done this type of surgery many years ago themselves (hmm, back in the time when they kept you in hospital and administered pain relief thus you wouldn't need to take it home I believe) anyway, the GP rang the ward, no one seemed to know anything about it, the SHO on duty said they thought it rather a strange thing to do too, so the answer was no to the medication we'd been told two months earlier we'd be having. Also, if he got into severe pain we were told to ring back the GP who would refer us back to the hospital to be re-assessed...just what you want to do to a 6 year old in pain! A lack of clear direction on this issue, as other parents we've spoken to have also been told they will be given the medication.

So this ending made us very cross about the luck of the draw of pain relief.

However, the operation, the team involved, the experience whilst in hospital itself up until the point of discharge was very good and to a very high standard.