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My mum's experience

Posted By Diesel Italian

"My mum's experience"

About: Hillingdon Hospital / Accident and emergency

(as a relative),

First of all... triage is done in public in the a and e waiting room! My 74 year old mum was then ushered into the acute waiting room in a and e for 3 1/2 hours wait on a hard chair struggling to breathe and in pain. After this time, after me complaining loudly and being   told by the doctor on duty he has other patients, in a packed, hot, noisy room a kind nurse gave her oxygen and checked her sats. She was so uncomfortable and needed to lay down, I kept asking for a bed and was told it was a 3 hour plus wait not including the 3. 5 hours she had already waited...so I drove her to my house, gave her painkillers and put her to bed, exhausted. 2 days later she was taken back by ambulance, straight in resus, close to death with double pneumonia. 3rd world health ‘care’. If it weren’t for my mum having family she would have died and no one would be held accountable.  

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Responses

Response from Hillingdon Hospital 4 years ago
Hillingdon Hospital

Submitted on 06/04/2020 at 13:53
Published on nhs.uk on 08/04/2020 at 15:48

The Hillingdon Hospitals Foundation Trust is very concerned about your feedback posted on NHS Choices and wishes to, sincerely apologise to you for the experience your mother received whilst in A&E. We have passed on your comments to the A&E matron

  • {{helpful}} {{helpful == 1 ? "person thinks" : "people think"}} this response is helpful

Update posted by Diesel Italian (a relative)

I wrote this 2 years ago so why did it take so long to respond? Passing on the complaint is not helpful and what would have been helpful is that triage is now always done in private, and the total wait time is always now less than 4 hours. Disgusting level of care. Disgusting response. ‘Lessons will be learned’

Response from James Munro, Chief executive, Care Opinion 4 years ago
James Munro
Chief executive,
Care Opinion

I lead the Care Opinion team, with a focus on research, education and health care policy

Submitted on 09/04/2020 at 12:10
Published on Care Opinion at 12:11

picture of James Munro

Dear Diesel Italian

I can see that, as you say, the response from the NHS has arrived after an extremely long delay. I think anyone would be upset to wait so long for a response. At Care Opinion we advise healthcare providers to respond within a week whenever possible.

I wanted to provide some additional information from Care Opinion to clarify the causes of the delay.

Unfortunately, Hillingdon Hospital NHSFT doesn't use Care Opinion to respond to stories directly, even though it has staff registered to do so. Instead, it waits for us to send the story to nhs.uk. Then it uses nhs.uk to respond, and we pull the response back from there.

We originally published your story on 16 July 2018 and successfully sent the story to nhs.uk the same day.

I see that on nhs.uk it says your story was "Posted on 12 September 2019". There's an unexplained delay here. I know that nhs.uk were making technical changes at that time, which might be part of the explanation.

Then it says the hospital "Replied on 06 April 2020". So there's another delay (7 months).

The response was published on 8 April and we pulled it back onto Care Opinion on 9 April (today).

I hope that helps to provide a little more information. I'm really sorry that you experienced such a long delay in getting this response.

  • {{helpful}} {{helpful == 1 ? "person thinks" : "people think"}} this response is helpful

Update posted by Diesel Italian (a relative)

I can understand it’s not your fault. But even so it’s not helping future patients.

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