"Friendly staff, but very slow"

We came to visit the children’s accident and emergency today with my 8 year old son who injured his foot.

Firstly, the only car park we could get into was car park 7 and that was such a long walk to and from the a&e department - luckily I found a nearby wheelchair to take my son in but it was still a long walk for me. It would be better if you could get to a&e by walking through the main hospital.

Upon meeting the lady at reception she was very friendly and as was the triage lady who then told us to wait in ‘area 2’ inside the children’s a&e department. She told us that we only had 2 others in front of us so we should be seen very quickly.

We took our seats in area 2 where only 2 other children were waiting to be seen. There wasn’t much for children to do in the waiting room, apart from watch the same channel on tv and my son was very bored. They had a couple of already coloured in activity sheets and some baby toys. The chairs all had holes in them which had been covered by sellotape. Not a very inviting room for children.

We had to wait for over 3 hours to be seen (even though we only had 2 children in front of us) and it felt like ages for everyone to be called to see a doctor in between name calls. Staff seem to run this department very, very slowly. The lady on reception told me that they only had 1 injury specialist to see all children.

As time went on, more children and parents came into the waiting room and so much so that there were parents standing for ages because there were no more chairs to sit on.

It would be a good idea to make area 2 bigger, have more seating and more activities for the children to do whilst they wait so that the waiting time wouldn’t be so tough for them.