"It varies"

I have had occassion to visit your hospital frquently with my elderly mother my last visit and sadly hers was nearly a year ago now and it has taken me this long to start to get over the experience enough to feed back. She was admitted through A/E on several occasions all with different problems and they were courteous and efficient and managed very well given the almost constant bed pressures and volume of blue light arrivals. The orthopaedic department at your hospital surgeons,nursing staff and therapists are magnificent and despite a challenging hip# manged my Mum with kindness and thoughtfullness throughout and restored her to fitness so many many thanks.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the medical wards (we have experienced all of them having been moved numerous times during her 2 stays) where patients are second class citizens and relatives even worse. I work as a clinician for the NHS myself so understand the difficulties but the care was atrocious. I could never find anyone to talk to me about Mums condition and just had to watch her deteriorate with no-one seeming to care. In the end I had to read the medical notes myself since none of the nurses or junior doctors supposedly caring for her knew anything about her. In her last visit she was dumped in a side room and no-one even unpacked her bag it was as if they were expecting her to die and could not be bothered, sadly thats exactly what happened. Yes she was confused but this was recent, 3 days earlier she had been dancing at a party in the afternoon entertaining all her friends and family with stories of her youth, that morning she had as usual walked round the block and completed the times crossword in under 20 minutes !! Imagine my shock when I was called to come to the hospital urgently 2 days later when I arrived a nurse sat me in the middle of the corrider and said " she is RIP" exactly that, no further explanation. The Doctor when he arrived was kindness itself but obviously knew nothing about my Mums history or condition or indeed why she had died. The death certificate(which it took me 3 days to get) said she died of fraility and old age, presumably she contracted this condition over the 3 days you had been caring for her because prior to that she was a vibrant and independant person who looked after herself and all of her friends.

I was shocked, disgusted and ashamed of the NHS that both I and she had worked in all our lives, she really did not deserve this.