"Constantly surprised at their ability to..."

What I liked

Nothing. The diagnostic tool of choice for abdominal pain is either laying of hands, ultrasound, endoscopy or colonoscopy. Compare this to a modern hospital where the abdominal pains that I had would have been observed by CT or MRI quickly. I left in pain, with no diagnosis. I returned to have a colonoscopy weeks later which didnt find my pain.

US hospitals dont take any chances, they scan until they find the problem - scanning is now cheaper than having 5 doctors umm and aah, poke and prod.

When my son banged his head recently, I called the EDGH to see if the MRI or CT scanners were working - the CT was out of order and there was no-one to operate the MRI.

I took our son to a London hospital. I kept track of the availability of the MRI / CT in Eastbourne and it was three days before the PCT was able to confirm that there were no facilities operational over a long weekend - 4 days in total!

Some of the staff are undoubtedly good, but a hospital needs a minimum standard for all staff for the hospital to operate effectively. It does not, its filthy by comparison to the main London hospitals or Basingstoke. This hospital fails to impress with the big stuff because its too broad in scope - its a frightening prospect to be in there. A local hospital must provide the top 4 to the highest standard - and EDGH does not.

1. Accident and Emergency - its amateurish with little use of modern diagnostic tools

2. Maternity - needs clean wards, good diagnosticians and excellent surgical staff.

3. Urgent diagnostics and preventative procedures such as strokes, heart attacks, burst appendix, internal bleeding, brain ops

4. Serious infections such as septicaemia, E-coli etc

Planned procedures such as hip operations etc should be done by others

What could be improved

Cleanliness is appalling. Temporary nursing staff dont really care about patients.

A lot of virtually untrained health care assistants.

Insufficient use of MRI and CT - these are powerful diagnostic tools. Rumour has it that the radiologists are not expert enough at interpreting these.

Its a particularly weak area - I have heard horror stories from many in the local community.

Anything else?

The problems appear to be so widespread that closure is more likely than a complete over-haul of this crumbling organisation. How this can be allowed in a town that is among the fastest growing in the country I do not know.