"Friendly staff but poor service."

What I liked

In all my experiences with Russells Hall hospital, I have come to the conclusion that there is very little to like.

What could be improved

Everything!!! Its appalling, both myself and my mother are trained health professionals and during my fathers stay in the hospital I witnessed countless cardinal errors. The most important of which is being aware of patient needs. My father has full mental capacity and at no time was he consulted on decision making or informed about what would be taking place, treatment wise, each day. One example of this being, taking him for a chest x-ray that he knew nothing about, at 6:30/7pm on a Saturday evening and making him wait until late Monday morning for the results, causing him undue worry and sleepless nights as he thought there was something wrong with the results. Why do an x-ray on a weekend, knowing full well that there will be no one in to interpret it until the following week, and not inform the patient. We asked the nurse about the x-ray and she didn't even know he was going to have one! An example of poor knowledge of staff would be a nurse not even knowing what an EEG was, when my father asked about it because he was booked in for one! This I find worrying and unacceptable from nursing staff working on a stroke unit.

My father has been an inpatient for the past week and we still have no answers. We are no further into establishing a diagnosis as we were a week ago and all we've done is wait around for 7 days with very little progress. I do appreciate things take time but when you aren't regularly updated, it becomes very frustrating.

Bottom line- staff need to be patient centred and consider the capabilities of the individual patients. As I mentioned previously, my father has full mental capacity and must/should be informed regarding all decision that are integral to his care. I feel that there needs to be an improvement in working as a multidisciplinary team.

Anything else?

This is not my first visit to the hospital and I am equally disappointed with it's A&E department. There is no sense of urgency where there should be and there are always lots of staff, doing very little. I'm sure this doesn't stand for all departments and all staff members but these are just my opinions based upon my experiences and observations.

I just hope that not everyone's experiences are like mine. And that the hospital take not of feedback and take actions to improve its service.