"Review of Antenata Maternity Department"

I have been disappointed with the Kingston antenatal ward.

Everything was going ok until an anomaly came up in a scan I had at 22 weeks.

The sonographer ( who was actually good and had a very nice manner) spotted it on a Wednesday afternoon and I then had to wait until the following Tuesday afternoon for a follow up appointment and scan with a consultant.

I feel that was much too long to wait as me and my husband were absolutely sick with worry.

In the meantime we therefore booked in for a private scan at clinic.

I then met with the Consultant at Kingston who I didn’t find very sympathetic and they clearly didn’t have time to answer all the questions I had.

I then had some necessary blood tests to see if I could have passed on an infection or chromosome abnormality to my child.

The blood tests took ages to come back (some of them clearly weren’t requested when they were supposed to have been) and when I checked the length of time we’d been told to wait for the results with other external doctors including the private doctor I saw, they all agreed the results shouldn’t have taken anywhere near that long. In fact they took longer and I could never get hold of anybody on the phone to check whether they had come in. In the meantime I again couldn’t bear to wait that long and so had the tests done privately and got the results back a week quicker.

Furthermore the follow up checks prescribed by the Kingston consultant weren’t as thorough as other doctors have told me is recommended.

I also had an incident where I turned up for a scan and despite receiving a text messages confirming my appointment (including one the day before) I was told that it had been cancelled without anybody contacting me to tell me why.

Apparently it was because I had missed an appointment that I found this really upsetting because I’d taken time off work to get to the appointment and been anxiously awaiting the scan to check that everything was ok.