"Unsatisfied with my care Rotherham District General Hospital"

Arrived home from 4 weeks in India where I suffered the last 2 weeks with High temperature, violent shivers and heavy sweating and convulsive diarrhoea. Another episode the following day required an emergency doctor who sent me down to Rotherham District General suspecting malaria where I was admitted.

After a brief period on one ward where I was seen by 3 or 4 doctors, all with differing views, I was transferred up to another ward. I was told it was important to send off stool samples to test for salmonella and did supply a sample and was told the results would be back a couple of days later. When I asked the doctor who came to see me around this time about the results I was told the sample had gone astray so there were no results to be seen. So the doctor who spent less than a minute with me, who I thought knew I was still suffering chronic diarrhoea, stomach pains and rear end bleeding said I was fit to go home. The truth was that I was glad to get out of there, came home nearly as bad as I was when I was admitted. I feel I received no treatment and now need to see my GP hoping for better service.

During my short stay on this second ward I asked for a shower and was directed to a shower room, unfortunately I had to point out to a nurse that there was what appeared to be excrement on the shower floor. In the early hours of the morning I was awakened by a strange old lady entering my cubicle and sitting down on my bed, she was obviously confused and didn’t know where she was, she nearly gave me a heart attack, but where were the staff who are supposed to be caring for the vulnerable patients?

I heard a foreign doctor who had come to attend to the patient in the next cubicle to me asking a nurse for some device the nurse didn’t recognise the name of, so the nurse had to take the doctor to a set of drawers and went through them all until the doctor recognised what they wanted and the nurse then told the doctor that we call this a canular, very worrying situation if a doctor can’t communicate even the simplest of things to staff.

I’m disgusted that the hospital doesn’t seem to have any quality systems in place and what I saw was, in my opinion, a situation of unorganised mayhem. I witnessed on more than one occasion a patient’s alarm going unanswered for up to 45 minutes. I also heard violent verbal abuse of staff from at least 2 patients who I thought should really have been on a psychiatric ward. The staff were as good as they could have been under the circumstances.

It comes as no surprise to me that there have been outbreaks of norovirus at the hospital because the parts of the hospital I saw were simply filthy. In my opinion, this is because the cleaners simply don’t get the time to do the job right.

Statements from managers like the term “we are trying to improve” and “we have to learn from our mistakes” don’t wash with me. The hospital I saw seemed chaotic, and in my case I felt there was no continuity of proper diagnosis or treatment and I suspect the sole aim of the doctor I saw was to look important and clear beds. They wrote a letter to my doctor and I didn’t recognise the person they were relating to was me. I felt that they got the report to my doctor seriously wrong.

Why wasn’t my rear end examined? Why wasn’t I kept in until results from a second stool sample were forthcoming? Why didn’t I receive any treatment for the chronic diarrhoea? Why wasn’t I treated with gastro intestinal antibiotics? I was told there was an infection so why wasn’t it treated? Why was I admitted in the first place if I was fit to go home in the same condition?