"No respite from the temperature"

My son is being treated for a form of childhood cancer, and as such we are frequent visitors to, and very often residents of, wards 2A and 2B, the Schiehallion wards.  

My story is not regarding the care he receives, which is faultless, and for which we are eternally grateful. The reason I’m writing is regarding the ridiculous temperature of the patient rooms, and to give an insight into how this actually affects families having to live in these rooms.  

We were recently admitted for a course of IV antibiotics as my son had spiked a temperature, we spent 5 nights in total on the ward. The room we were admitted to easily reached 27 degrees on each day of our admission. Because my son had symptoms of a potentially infectious virus, we were not permitted to leave the room, or even have the door of the room ajar. The windows in the rooms do not open, and when I asked for a fan, I was advised this was not possible due to infection control policies.  

As an adult I can understand the rationale behind these measures, and the last thing we want is to spread infection to other kids on the ward.  However the result for my 7 year old son was that he felt that he was being punished for being ill by being locked in an oven for a week, with no respite from the temperature whatsoever. It’s a miracle that his temperature ever came down far enough for us to get home. Add into the mix the fact that there was an issue with the water on the ward being potentially infected at the time, which meant I couldn’t even offer my son a shower to cool him down.  

I was left questioning which century we were actually living in.  These conditions are simply unacceptable for anyone to have to endure, much less children who already go through enough due to their illnesses.

Something needs to be done about this.