"A & E"

Dear Anonymous – I am very sorry you had a poor experience when you attended the Southmead A&E department. I am sure you will have read, or heard on the news, that nationally NHS A&E departments are currently under considerable pressure. Regrettably, at the time of your visit the department was coping with many very sick patients, including 3 simultaneous traumas.

The wait to be seen had increased to over 4 hours in the “see and treat areas” as a number of ED staff were needed to assist the trauma teams.

The ED staff have asked me to apologise that despite doing the correct thing unfortunately you were caught in the delay caused by:

1) an unusually large volume of patients attending

2) attending at a time where ED had to redeploy staff to cope with multiple very sick patients and 3 trauma patients.

I understand that, in line with the normal practice, waiting room announcements were made advising patients of the current wait times, but it is not entirely clear if you were attending at these times. The A&E team worked very hard that night to cope and most staff missed breaks so that delays were minimised, but the situation still remained very difficult.

The ED manager wishes to personally apologise to you, and also to the rest of the patients that attended at the time, and to reassure all patients that despite the long waits the team were doing everything possible to cope with the situation.

They would also like to reassure you that you did exactly the correct thing by contacting the out of hours GP and then attending A&E on their advice, and to repeat that they are sorry the department failed to meet their own high expectations on this occasion.

I hope that you are now feeling much better and are well on the way to making a full recovery.

King regards – Steve Sykes

Advice and Complaints Team