I only have one dc but I had experience of three different wards (two in the same hospital) in the first two weeks of her life and they were all v different.
Postnatal ward: I'd had a caesearean so was there for two nights. The food was actually pretty good on this one. A lovely orderly always brought it to me - at first I still had a catheter so couldn't get up to go for it. I'm wheat intolerant and she was great at making sure I got the right food. One night the midwife offered to take my LO for a few hours so I got some sleep. When i woke up and went to get her she was looking after four or five of them - they were all peacefully sleeping in their cribs around her desk! At one point a lady had several noisy family members around her bed and they were still there half an hour after visiting ended. The midwife came and was v no-nonsense - told them to leave pronto and told them off for disturbing others and for having a non-related child with them (were only supposed to have siblings I think).
I did spend the first two hours in a four bed bay then got shifted to a much bigger bay. They were really apologetic about moving me about. The other three women in the four bed bay didn't have their babies with them because they were all in intensive care or a special unit. The staff were doing their best to make sure women with their babies (like me) weren't in with them as that could upset them. But at the point I arrived on the ward that was the only bed going. When they moved me they explained (once I was in the new bay and out of earshot of the women who didn't have their babies) that they had moved me as soon as they could to a bay where women did have their babies with them.
It was far too hot - I swear the NHS could make a huge dent in it's deficit by turning down its heating! The last time I went to our emergency walk in centre I thought I was going to pass out from the heat! And the Bounty Lady really got me cross! She convinced the woman opposite me to have her photos taken then later this woman get really upset about how much it had cost. And she acted as if she was a member of hospital staff until I bluntly asked her if she was or not! They just shouldn't be allowed on postnatal wards - we all have cameras on our phones now for goodness sake!
After two days I was ready to be discharged and asked instead to go to a local community hospital. At this hospital you can have a natural birth if you've had a straightforward pregnancy (I hadn't and I wanted a more conventional hospital birth anyway) but you can also go there for recovery for up to three nights regardless of what kind of birth you had or where you gave birth. I went because friends had highly recommended it, but this is where I had problems! They were so obsessed with me breastfeeding (which in all fairness was what i said I wanted to do) that they failed to notice my milk just hadn't arrived so my LO was basically starving. Their idea of a wheat free diet was to just not give me carbs! With hindsight this is almost certainly why my milk wasn't arriving - in the end I did mostly breastfeed for nearly 17 months and I was always hungry for carbs! And a lady who was discharged a few hours before I got there had apparently spend all her time talking loudly on the phone with no one asking her to stop.
On the plus side it was a bit like 'home from home' - my husband watched telly with other Dad's in the dining room while holding the baby and I had a nap; we served ourselves dinner when it arrived, we could bath our babies etc etc. Partners were allowed for most of the day but they were all asked to go away for a couple of hours in the afternoon while we rested quietly. This was their opportunity to go get lunch and the quiet was lovely!
We went home on day four and on day five the midwife came and discovered my LO had lots 18% of her birth weight - she couldn't believe I'd spent time at the community hospital and no one had noticed I had no milk. So we were admitted to the Children's Ward for three nights - half way through our stay a Sister told my Mum we hadn't been send back to the postnatal ward because once you leave the hospital your baby is considered 'dirty' and can't go back to postnatal. What lovely terminology to use about a newborn!
On this ward I got wheat free food but for some bizarre reason the kitchen also always pureed it! But at least it was filling. There was also a constant supply of snacks (they only fed the kids and the breastfeed mums - other parents had to go to the canteen, so they had loads of snacks for the kids as some were too ill to eat at meal times but perked up at other times). I basically spent all my time hoovering up all the snacks and lo and behold my milk started to arrive.
The staff on this ward were lovely but the bed manager put us on a ward full of sick, contagious kids. My LO was five days old and hadn't had any jabs and was quite ill from having spent her first five days starving! The nurses were livid - one of them was in tears because she wasn't allowed to put us in a private room even when one became available. Our consultant told me to be 'as anti social as possible' - basically keep the curtains around our bed closed at all times and not mingle with the sick kids and their families. They got an incubator for my LO - it wasn't being powered, it just meant she was in an environment that was slightly protected from the rest of the ward. But that made it hard to hold her and bond her so I ended up taking her out of it half the time to avoid bonding issues further down the line. When I left the nurse handed me a feedback form and told me to use it to complain, which I did!
No one got any sleep on the kid's ward , so that's not specific to postnatal wards. I had to pump every three hours and then wake my little girl up to feed her and in the process I'm sure I woke everyone up. Sick children don't sleep - so there was always someone awake and making noise, the parents slept on creaky fold out beds next to their child's hospital bed (I was in a proper hospital bed because obviously my LO was too small for it). The night shift consultant often had to wake patients for various reasons - he had to try to get blood out of my little girl half way between our three hourly feeds in the dead of the night - I could have killed him for waking us and in my exhaustion I wound up screaming at him and woke the whole ward in the process, but he was getting funny results from her blood samples and desperately needed to find out why. After that one of the nurses let me sleep for six hours and did the three hourly feeds for me. I woke to find all the nurses cooing over my LO at their nurse's station. They also let my husband sleep in the day room which I don't think they were supposed to do, but it kept us together a family. My bed was right next to a telly that played CBeebies at high volume for 13 hours a day, then they told me to get as much sleep as a I could!!! Again - they wanted to put me in a private room so I could get quiet and rest and get my milk supply up, but the bed manager wouldn't let them. Apparently my LO was the patient not me so they weren't allowed to take account of my needs despite my LO's treatment involving being bresatfed by me as much as possible!!! I couldn't watch telly for a few months afterwards - it made me think of being kept awake by the sound of kid's programmes when I was desperate to sleep!
They discharged us when my LO's weight was getting better and within a few days of getting home my milk supply was great. I just needed peace and quiet and good food to get there - and I only really got both of those things once we were both home.
Overall, my experience was that most staff were simply doing the best they could with limited resources.