"Great Staff, especially in the Antenatal clinic..."

First of all I have to say the staff at Croydon University Hospital, like pretty much all NHS staff, are fantastic, they really are wonderful people, delivering a world class service on a shoe-string budget!

The hospital looks a bit tired and as with most hospitals I've visited in the UK, it's a maze inside, it has poor parking facilities and washrooms are hard to find and probably a little dirtier than you might hope to find them.. but the state of the toilets is clearly down to the people using them, so it's always difficult to complain about that.

So far we've visited the Early Pregnancy Unit, the waiting times in there are terrible, we were sent home on the first day and had to wait for 3 hours on the second day. At the time I was hugely disappointed in this, but later I recognised the hospital had probably already (correctly) identified our concerns were less severe than some others. We've also visited the Antenatal clinic on a few occasions, the staff in both departments are wonderful. In the Antenatal clinic, there's always plenty of seating available and waiting times are kept to a minimum. The first visit to the Antenatal clinic did involve us being taken to many rooms, such as 1 room to record your height, another to record your weight, another for a blood test, this seemed inefficient, at best, but they clearly know what they're doing.

We're currently 20 weeks into our pregnancy and a couple of negative things have jumped out at us:

1. The Quality of the Scans when compared to other NHS hospitals in London

2. The production of Scanned images

1- When compared to hospitals in the Lewisham area, the image quality of our Scans (12 & 20 week) in Croydon is significantly poorer. I don't know if this is a poor quality printer or an older 'scanner' or if there is some strange thing about the amount of water that the person is carrying, etc etc etc, but the quality is noticeably deficient.

2- A friend, in the Lewisham area, is a few weeks ahead of us on this wonderful journey, they were asked how many scanned images they want (these are at a cost of about £4/ea), they chose 3 and were given 3 different images. They didn't get to choose them, but they had three different images all the same. When it was our turn in Croydon, we chose 2, again, no choice given, they just take the image to reception and you need to pay for them before seeing them, at which point we saw that the operative (whom we like) printed the same image twice. That unusual action led to this review.

This may seem like a negative review, and whilst I am a little annoyed about the duplication of a scanned image, I am certainly not negative about this hospital. Generally extremely happy with the service we receive from Croydon, and I would absolutely recommend the hospital to anyone.

Message to all NHS staff: Thank you & Keep up the great work.