Disgusting hospital

[Furyfurious]

I was discharged from hospital this week following surgery and a 5 night stay at an NHS hospital. I am absolutely traumatised. What I have seen and been exposed to was totally shocking. I will definitely be looking for a Private health care policy. The Nurses attitudes, patients attitudes poor (not all ) but a shambles. The smell of the ward, the food etc sorry but there needs to be resolution

Hugs for you too, @LeakyPipes. Dad was a functional alcoholic and was presenting very well, his admission wasn't even related to alcohol or liver etc so her comment was only based on his notes. It was an emergency admission and I had spent the hours waiting for the ambulance absolutely terrified about him going into withdrawal while waiting to be admitted. The nurse's comment was so unnecessary.
Luckily dad didn't hear it.

I'm sorry you've had repeated crap like this. When they knew he was dying (at a different hospital) an absolutely lovely nurse offered to get him a glass of a particular wine that they had discovered they both liked. It was too late in the end. She was fantastic. Afterwards I bought her a bottle of that wine as a thank you.

Far too many managers and not enough staff 'on the ground'. The administration is chronically bad in many cases, but still they build an empire of people with obscure-sounding job titles who do very little for the money they earn. Like the police (not only the Met, who are dire, but all constabularies), the NHS needs a root and branch sort-out and some dead wood chucked out - but this will never happen.

My mum received disgusting treatment in hospital recently.
She has lymphedema, reoccurring cellulitis and leg ulcers with exposed nerves.
She could not bare any weight on her legs or use a commode.
The first night she was in, she was put on a ward that had several older ladies with dementia/delirium/mental health issues. My mum has none of these problems.
She needed the toilet and asked for a bed pan. The nurse tipped the bed pan full of urine all over my mum when retrieving it.
She then called a male colleague over behind the curtain and they both pinned my mum to the bed and stripped her naked. My mum was trying to maintain her modesty and whilst the male nurse took my mum's top clothing off leaving her breasts exposed, the female nurse was forcing her legs apart where my mum was trying to shut them through fear of the male nurse being present.
My mum is a sexual assault survivor so this triggered her to have a panic attack. She had every right to refuse the male nurse and was screaming at him to leave and all he said was "we are all nurses here".
Because she had a panic attack, they treated her as if she was a threat and made security watch her all night. My mum spent the night crying because of the "assault" and no one checked to see if she was ok.
She was moved to a different ward the next day.
A ward where nurses would ignore buzzers. I had to ring the ward through switchboard to let them know my mum needed the toilet because they ignored the buzzers.
The staff would pick and choose who was allowed to go to the toilet. If someone had been an hour ago and needed to go again, they were told no and would urinate or defecate themselves. They would also act really annoyed if you needed help with anything.
My mum was desperate for the toilet in the early hours of the morning and they ignored the buzzers again. She got out of bed and tried to get to a toilet herself and because she couldn't bare weight on her legs, she fell backwards and broke her foot and urinated herself.
She was in hospital for a few weeks and it took them 13 days to x-ray it, despite my mum pleading with them.
They decided to insert a catheter so she wouldn't keep needing the toilet. The only time she needed a bed pan was for number 2. Well they left my mum covered in excrement. She ended up with sores that bad, another member of staff (who was actually nice) had to photograph them to document how bad they were.

Pals and legal action is in place.

I've attempted to look at this, it's pretty well impossible to compare different countries because of different primary care models and how different countries organise themselves. For example, I've visited a home for dementia patients in Holland with 200 residents which had full-time doctors and provided identical meals for staff and residents - the staff getting theirs free to make sure that quality was maintained, it was 400m from the general hospital, so transfers were very straightforward.
Almost all countries have reduced the number of hospital beds over the past couple of decades, but alcohol, drug and tobacco consumption mean that there is simply far more demand for services in some countries, Russia for example has three times the hospital bed provision as the UK.
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/hospital-beds-(per-10-000-population)

I had a Ukrainian living with me for a while and got to know a lot of Ukrainians through her. They go back to Ukraine for medical and dental treatment and think healthcare in the UK is terrible. Some of this seems to be down to the fact that they don't hand out anti biotics at every visit though, but honestly, I was embarrassed by the state of the country. At the same time Ukraine has terrible health outcomes compared to the UK, double the rate of child mortality and ten years shorter life expectancy. My Ukrainian guest believed breast cancer was certain death, for example and didn't know anyone who'd survived it.

Just to even it out - I've had a LOT of experience in hospitals after a near fatal car accident - the icu was exceptional, the surgeons saved my life and couldn't have treated me bette. The wards were....traumatic. No staff, shipped from pillar to post and nobody taking you seriously. Left in agony without meds for long periods. Recently have been to a&e a few times for heart issue and they have been fantastic, seen straight away and treated superbly. Had a baby last year and experience with maternity were hit and miss.

I think it's a lottery whether you get good care or not and obviously this shouldn't be the case. I used to trust doctors and nurses without question but now I am definitely wary. But not as wary as heading towards the barbaric health insurance system they have in the US.

Horrific, @FlumpyLump. Inexcusable. I hope your legal action is successful.

How do you know which way people voted?

I never understand why people have to phrase input like this.
You can just add facts like this into the conversation without coming over like a total bell-end with the ‘right?’ at the end.

There is this report, which ranks the UK 34th. Not great really.

www.internationalinsurance.com/health/systems/

Most of our figures in this report are only just above OECD average, i.e. nowhere near our historical comparator countries which are by far the wealthier of these nations.

www.oecd.org/unitedkingdom/health-at-a-glance-UK-EN.pdf

Not good cancer care outcomes, at all:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listoffcountriesbyyqualityoff_healthcare

Per the OECD our spending is very similar per capita to other comparable countries. Yet our outcomes are worse.

This report assessed our system as being the 34th ranking in the world. Hardly covering ourselves in glory given our relative wealth, and huge spending on health which makes up a far higher proportion of our tax revenue than in most countries while providing patients with poor outcomes and long waiting times.

Good to hear. Could you tell us a bit about ho that is achieved?

The WHO ranked the UK 18th. Well below Italy, Spain and others who spend far less per capita.

I agree with a PP it is difficult to make direct comparisons but if you look at a large number of data points over a large number of years what becomes clear is:

• We spend a similar amount at PPP per capita compared to most other G7/ G10 nations.
• We have health outcomes only around the level of the OECD average, which includes many far poorer countries who spend far less.
• We have very poor levels of preventative care, and despite it all being publicly funded still have huge health inequalities AS WELL as poor standards of care, higher mortality rates for treatable illnesses, and now also long waiting lists (far out of sync with countries that spend similar amounts per person at PPP), falling life expectancies, poor planning and organisation, lower numbers of doctors and hospital beds per person than comparable countries, siloes and a lack of a holistic approach, poor aftercare, and poor facilities, IT and equipment, as well as staffing shortages, poor prioritisation of resources, and also an unsustainable funding model that it has long been known will cripple the country economically without significant reform, even while it is failing to treat patients within reasonable timeframes and therefore increasing its own future projected costs and decreasing its potential funding by increasing chronic health problems and therefore reducing the number of net tax payers.

There is a reason that nobody in the world is proposing to copy our system. Lots of reasons, in fact. ^^

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None of it is a glowing endorsement, really.

I had a C-Section 3 months ago at NHS hospital and it was the most disgusting, dirty hole I’ve ever been in. I actually had to ask my anaesthetic if he didn’t mind using a cannula he hasn’t just dropped on the floor and picked up!

hygiene was shocking. Left to sit in filth and same bedding I was operated on until discharged, ward toilet filthy, I couldn’t even get someone to take a dirty nappy for me (epidural and catheter so literally couldn’t do it)

FTM and the care was atrocious. I had a complicated pregnancy, lost a lot of blood and baby was a low birth weight and was left in a dark corner of a ward behind a curtain and saw nobody for 7 hours overnight….I then got to listen to the day shift bicker about how night shift had forgotten about me….so….not great!

I am sorry for those who have had bad experiences. My father was very ill last year and was in hospital for a week. The hospital was brilliant. The staff were brilliant and the care was brilliant. It really could not have been improved.

I was in hospital for a week after having ds 19 years ago & left with PTSD due to poor care. I had 5 operations in the space of 9 months in a private hospital under NHS choices & the care I got was fantastic. I have made ds promise that should I have any life threatening condition, he will let me die without going to hospital & am in the process of getting it all done legally with my wishes.

When we lived in the UK we paid for BUPA. Worth every pence.

I am so sorry. That is just horrific beyond words.

I got a fever and felt flu-y while on AC chemotherapy (which had previously given me neutropenic sepsis) so I got sent to my local AMAU.

To cut a long story short, they kept me in for over a week hooked up to "prophylactic" antibiotics, even though it took 1 day to establish that I had no bacterial infection and my symptoms (which went away quickly) were due to enterovirus found in my throat.

Their justification was that my neutrophil levels started falling making me vulnerable to infection, so best to pump me full of antibiotics in a place full of disease and shit-smeared toilets.

There is a drug to stimulate the bone marrow to make neutrophils, however, they couldn't contact the haemotology dept in the same hospital or the "sister" hospital to prescribe it. For DAYS!

When I started making noises about discharge against medical advice, they agreed to discharge me - still neutropenic, with no treatment - as long as I came back for blood tests.

I missed my next immunotherapy infusion due to raised liver enzymes, probably from the pointless antibiotics.

Stay well away from hospitals if you value your life unless it’s a life or death or emergency situation, they know absolutely nothing about health. Medical error is the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA at least!!