"Overall appears to be a good hospital but patient..."

What I liked

My wife has chosen Queen's for maternity services and I had accompanies her for some of the visits/ checkups. The hospital has a warm feeling and there are people around to help you. The departments are well sign-posted and decreases chances of getting lost in such big hospitals. Overall the hospital appears to be suitable for maternity services, barring the experiences I have written below. Keeping my fingers crossed for my baby's birth!

What could be improved

There are a couple of instances I would like to highlight:

1. My wife was advised to go in for monitoring of the baby's movement. Although the hospital staff asked her to come in at the earliest, when we went there she had to wait for atleast 1.5hrs before midwife could initially examine her. Thereafter another 2.5hrs wait before she could be put on a monitoring system. When the doctor came to check the monitoring results she found out that the system had not been setup appropriately and she asked it to be reset again for another 30mins atleast (and this was after 1hr of monitoring already) - this did appear being negligent. Overall, we spent 5.5hrs at the hospital and there was no one who advised us either before or during the process that it could take that long. Not being prepared for that long a time at the hospital, my pregnant wife was anyways quite tired and famished at the end of the process.

Improvement points: (a) Advise beforehand, if possible, as to how long a visit may be expected to last. At least, keep informed during the process, if earlier advice is not possible.

(b) More care should be demonstrated by staff towards patient sessions so that time is not wasted as a result of incorrect test setups.

2. A few days after, my wife rang in to find out the results of her blood test. The staff could not locate her test results in the first instance and asked her to call back in an hour. When she did, they said they could not read her sample and no results were found from her sample! That is quite strange in terms that no one called my wife to say her sample was invalid until she rang in after almost 5days. Her having to wait while they 'dig' for the results and finally not able to tell her any result, perhaps indicate the hospital would have either misplaced the results or did not carry out the tests in time. For whatever reasons, this just demonstrates negligence again from the staff.