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"Lack of Disabled toilet facilities"

About: Princess Royal University Hospital / General surgery

I was admitted via ambulance to A&E on Wednesday 14th December 2016 with a suspected bowel obstruction of a large umbilical hernia, fortunately after investigation and over night stay on surgical ward 6 I was discharged the following day. The care I received from the ambulance staff, doctors, nurses and all the staff at the hospital was 1st class, many thanks to every one. The reason for my complaint is as a bi-lateral amputee and a full-time wheelchair user is complete absence of disabled toilet facilities, I was unable to access the toilet even to urinate, I had to use a urine bottle first and then empty it into the toilet as there was not room to turn my wheelchair to forward transfer, I did manage to transfer sideways which was unsafe. When I enquired I was told by staff "there are no disabled toilets on the ward".

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Responses

Response from Princess Royal University Hospital 7 years ago
Princess Royal University Hospital
Submitted on 30/12/2016 at 12:14
Published on nhs.uk on 31/12/2016 at 01:30


I do hope that you have now fully recovered and the care that you received was good.

However, I am sorry to hear about the difficulties that you had with accessing suitable toilets.

I have contacted the ward and they have confirmed that not all surgical wards have disabled toilet facilities.

The normal process would be to transfer a patient to one of the surgical wards that do have disabled toilet facilities. However, due to the Norovirus breakout, there were insufficient beds as our side rooms were being used to isolate patients.

I appreciate that is not ideal and am very sorry that you were inconvenienced in this way.

This is something that we need to address so that this can be avoided in the future.

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