"Surgery excellent, follow up care poor"

My last experience of The Walton Centre was not a positive one.

It was some time ago now (2017) I cannot recall the actual date/month but I have been meaning to leave a review since. When we arrived at the Walton Centre car park there was a fire drill and everybody had been evacuated from the building.

What struck me the most was the number of staff in their NHS uniforms smoking, near to the entrace, with the sign about the site being " a smoke free site" within view. I thought it was disgraceful and so unprofessional that this was ever allowed to happen.

My husband was going to a follow up appointment following the removal of a brain tumour. The surgeon had been excellent and thankfully the operation has been successful, we are eternally grateful to the surgeon and his clincial team for this.

However, following diagnosis this period has been one of the hardest things we have ever been through as a family.

It was not helped by the rudeness and unhelpfulness of the surgeon's secretary, who I found to be rude, unhelpful and obstructive, this really is not what you need when you are going through such an experience.

I was trying to arrange his follow up appointment to be on the same day as his MRI scan, as we have to travel some distance to each appointment, she told me to ring the MRI department myself, I asked her if she could do that and get back to me, her response to me was "why should I?"

I was just disgusted by this attitude and lack of basic manners in her tone.

We also received a letter on the actual day that we had an appointment - so had no chance at all of getting to the appointment on time.

When I called up about this I wasn't even offered an apology let alone any concern that he had now missed an important appointment.

I found the Nursing care to be lacking also, I still vividly remember when one of the Nurses was taking blood from my husband and she was not able to do it, she was becoming increasingly frustrated and eventually told us she had a bus to catch.

We were just astounded at the unprofessionalism, we were left not knowing if she had arranged for somebody else to take the bloods or if we needed to sort it out ourselves.

I could give more examples of such poor behaviour whilst on the ward.

Finally, I have read through the responses that The Walton Centre have posted to previous reviews, I think it says a lot that whoever posts the responses can't even be bothered to proof read what they have written, write in full sentences that actually make sense or adhere to the basic rules of grammer. I think this is probably a wider reflection of standards at The Walton Centre in general.

Overall, I would say most of the Clinicians we encountered were very good at their jobs with the exception of the Nursing care which requires a lot of improvement.

The attitude of some of the adminastrative and clerical staff was truly diabolical.