"Concerns over the treatment of relatives"

My mum was recently transferred to QMC from Kings Mill hospital with a bleeding aortic aneurysm.

My sister and niece accompanied her, and were taken straight to the resus department and where she was treated straight away. But a nurse tried several times to get a line into her arm, this was hurting mum and when she tried to tell them they obviously knew better, when mum tried to tell them again that they were hurting and they didn't listen, she waved her finger, the nurse said "don't do that", mum said its hurting me, she said I would get a trained nurse to insert it, I'm a trainee.

When I arrived to the resus, my sister told me where to go, I found the resus and rang the bell, no one answered. I rang my sister to say that I was waiting outside resus, at this moment they were going to move mum to theatre, my sis told them I was waiting to come in, they fetched me in, 2 minutes and she was off, my sis and I accompanied her up to the theatre ward.

They said she would be going straight into theatre, we said see you later, that was it, the last we saw of her for 5.5 hours. No one told us what was happening, where to go, no waiting room for relatives was offered, we had to make our way back to A&E and hang around, and hang around, and hang around, no one was telling us anything.

We made enquiries with the A&E department, she made enquiries and no one knew anything, eventually we were taken to a relatives room in A&E, again we had to do all the leg work to find anything out. After several attempts the A&E nurse got us to the correct ward and we were reunited with mum.

QMC is supposed to be a world beater? No, not in my mind, it's got a lot to learn about patient and relative relationships.

On trying to leave the ward E16, the signage telling you where the way out was, stopped at the end of the ward. Where do we go now? We found our way to the lift area, looked on a plan of the hospital and found where we thought we should be getting out, i.e. floor A. No, we had to then climb 4 flights of stairs to get to the way out, this found, arrived back at the car park. Again, signage was ridiculous, not a good way to spend a Saturday. Not a very pleasant experience at all.