"Appauling lack of communication,..."

What I liked

Nothing

What could be improved

Internal communication between the E.N.T. and the Glenfield Hospital need to improve in order to avoid unbelievable delays.

Communication with patients needs to improve vastly. Delays - E.N.T. received my diagnosis 5th April and waited to tell me on the 18th April.This department needs to learn how to treat patients with dignity - having been told that breast cancer had returned, my daughter and I were told to wait for a letter from the Glenfield Breast Care Clinic which would probably take around 2 weeks. We left the consultation room into the waiting room and corridor in a state of great upset, we were given no support numbers, no information leaflets, basically left to get on with it. The hospital is very busy however, that is not an excuse to treat patients as just numbers. The whole process of getting diagnosed needs speeding up. Multi discipline Team - there is no communication between this team and the patient - hence no involvement in treatment.

Bank Holidays causing delays - other emergency services work through Bank Holidays, unfortunately hospital clinics do not operate on Bank Holidays, resulting in further appointment delays. Should the hospital consider moving clinics and specifically the meetings of the M.D.T. to days other than Mondays - which is when the majority of the Bank Holidays fall.

Anything else?

The Minister for Health was recently quoted as saying that "the most important people in the NHS are the patients" . Unhappily my experiences at the hands of the Leicester Royal Infirmary and the E.N.T. have proved that the staff certainly do not share this belief. It is now all number crunching.

I was in the hands of the E.N.T. department for investigations for possible recurrence of cancer for a period of two and a half months (February, March and half of April 2011). During this time I waited over a month to for an appointment for a camera check of mouth and throat, and then had to wait more than a month for a needle biopsy.

No-one seems to listen to what the patient has to say, and if you complain you have to "jump through hoops" to get heard.