"Fantastic care, shame about everything else"

Anything else?

My father was recently an inpatient in Cardiothoracics for Mitral and Aortic Valve replacements, hardly surgery to be taken lightly. He spent five days on ICCU and three more on the ward. As Nurse myself, I had a critical eye for the care and I could not fault that at all. It was very evident that he was receiving high-standards of expert care and close observation. I am eternally grateful for this and plan to write to the relevent Matron to state this. My sincere thanks to the staff that looked after him so diligently. In fairness, this is what's most important. However, care aside, we had a very negative and stressful time during his inpatient stay. New Cross is our nearest specialist centre for this procedure. We were told that we would get six weeks notice of his surgery. We had one week. At 75, my father is the youngest of his siblings and is a widower. I have no siblings and a disabled wife. Planning his hospital stay and the related logistics was a nightmare, especially at short notice. We live an hour and a quarter away and had to navigate the centre of Wolverhampton (no easy task, even with up to date SatNav) in order to reach the hospital. And on reaching it... I've never encountered a hospital with such truly awful and insufficient parking facilities. It typically took half an hour just to enter the car park! And then we found it woefully small with too few Blue Badge spaces and not barely enough room to actually manoever a vehicle. This is not a hospital that I have any desire to visit again.