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

Given the numbers of abandoned older citizens left to die in France, Spain, Italy, Poland etc throughout the pandemic, I wouldn't be looking to central/southern Europe as an optimum model for elder care.

I'm waiting until ER and ambulances are private before returning. It's a joke.

I was brought up in Greece and the hospital there (at the time) were terrible; family had to take food in and feed the patients and provide personal hygiene support.

I came to the UK 30 years ago and worked in the nhs until I retired a couple of years ago. When I started work I thought the hospitals in the UK were superb.

Move forward to today and my elderly father is in a UK hospital and it is dreadful, we are taking food into the hospital and feeding my father and supporting his personal hygiene ......I can't believe that the nhs is worse than Greek hospitals were in 80s & 90s, but they are.

I was saying that it is everone's best interest to ensure a well funded and effective NHS. I think your examples have reinforced that case.

@BluebellsForest obviously I can't vouch for every nurse in every setting but fundamentally yes I do think nurses are kind, there are obvious exceptions such a Lucy Letby etc but I can't belive many people would undertake three years of uni and the debts now associated with training to go into a fairly poorly paid job often working 14 hour shift and missing out on weekends, nights, etc if they didn't care. Its the system that breaks you, working daily with low level trauma, stress and seeing and hearing things that the average people will never encounter breaks some people down. Im sorry you had the experience you did and I can't excuse anybodys behaviour but I do believe staff really don't receive the support they should. Clearly this should never be reflected in patient care and the system needs to change.

The NHS is already well funded... the money just isn't spent in the right way.

Plus, the fact it was never designed to be used by 68 million+ people.

I'm not dismissing their experiences at all.
If you read further up thread you will see that I'm disgusted, as a nurse, by the toxic culture and utter shambles it has become.
I really hope that this toxic culture will be exposed in the enquiry into the leadership at CoC.
As I said anyone who is truly caring and tries to expose what is going on is either bullied out or driven into a breakdown.
Unfortunately there will always be some staff who should not be in health care but that's not everyone.

However cleanliness is like clock work in all the hospitals I have worked in.
There are even robot vacuum cleaners and they wash floors as well.
Machines that sterilise rooms.
It's audited and immediately dealt with as the consequences of CPE, MRSA and CDiff are extremely high.
Covid has introduced machines that filter particles out of the air.
So no I think complaints about cleaning are complete bullshit or from a few years ago.

No one has listened to us for years, we are always to blame and off they pop to vote Tory.

Well the birds are coming home to roost shortly!

You need to name this hospital and ward and report it.

What you say makes sense but again- voting Tory is not universal! I live in a very Tory area- never voted for them but others like me have no voice. In fact the whole political situation feeds directly into the whole NHS situation.

Can related. I'd a v similar experience earlier in the year. B/c of NHS waiting times, had a procedure done privately. Had been home few days when I got complications. Was taken into NHS hospital as emergency and was there for 5 nights. I did have some amazing individuals (doctors mainly) whose expertise was probably life-saving. But good grief, the noise, as you say; care staff shouting & laughing in the middle of night in ward of poorly patients. Some less poorly patients were yelling into their phones. I said to my DH if someone stood in the ward and banged two bin lids together, it couldn't have made it any worse. A cancer patient in next bed to me was crying. Because I was on quite strong meds, sometimes I'd fallen asleep when food came round and they forgot to feed me. One day I didn't get my medicines, which made me sick. It's the whole atmosphere of the place that's gone wrong. Accountability? I'd rather have matrons back.

Treliske is a holiday camp compared with its satellite community hospitals. It's in one of them that my dear mum suffered. And that is the word to use. It was part lack of funding. But mainly the cruelest of ward sisters. I should have complained. But you don't when you've got other stuff goi g on. We were spending every waking hour trying to access care at home but mum was 'bed blocking' and frankly she was treated like she was to blame.
At least Treliske allowed proper visiting. The cloak of post covid allowed the smaller hospital to only allow one designated person to visit once a week. Wilfully cruel.

I had to go into hospital a few years ago and the nurses were wonderful. Kind, considerate and really went above and beyond. Especially for the elderly lady next to me who needed help to toilet and shower.

Same hospital a few years later was like hell on Earth. 100% down to the nurses bad attitude.

They were sarcastic, cruel and seemed genuinely annoyed at having to actually care for people. I witnessed them ignoring the fact one woman couldn’t eat her dinner, laughing about personal matters at the nurses station, and one practically hissing venom at an elderly lady, clearly with advanced dementia, who had an accident.

Almost like they weren’t getting paid a wage, but that they were begrudgingly doing YOU a favour simply by being there.

My DM fondly recalls a great aunt who was a matron down in London. Apparently lazy nurses hated her because she was terrifying but the patients and good nurses loved her because she kept the standards very high.

Sounds like we need to bring the bossy matrons back!

When I had my children around 40 years ago a lot of the staff I encountered were unhelpful and some of them were downright unpleasant.

Cleanliness on the wards was pretty indifferent even then. And tbh the staff could be very impatient and resentful if asked about anything.

On the maternity ward there were so many complaints by patients about the night staff, all agency staff, that for a brief period the hospital tried to stop using agency staff, which didn't really work as that was only night staff they could get.

I remember about 35 years ago when I was having an operation. The surgeon came to explain to me about the procedure, followed around by a group of students.

After about 5 minutes of his rather patronising talk about what was going to happen during the operation I realised that he was describing a completely different procedure. Having pointed that out to him and the fact that the file he was holding wasn't mine - mine was overflowing and this was a very thin file - I didn't even get an acknowledgement of his error.

Thankfully, he did the right operation on me in the end but I think the NHS has been in a sorry state for quite a number of years.

I also think it very much depends on the part of the country you're in as to the length of waiting lists and quality of service. I know someone who lives in a rather nice part of London who has had several operations recently, often waiting a matter of weeks rather than years to be treated.

@explainthistomeplease I'm so sorry you went through that. My lovely Grandparents x 3 all had similar experiences.

I think most of Cornwalls population (and relatives) has an NHS nightmare story to tell.

Not an overnight stay, but the last time I was cared for by the NHS in a hospital was for an abortion and I was treated horribly by staff, one of the nurses seemed anti abortion as bizarre as it is to say about a medical professional, horrible experience. I'm now private and treated perfectly.

My mother died recently and was misdiagnosed with sciatica for a year and a half and put through physiotherapy while a tumour was growing on her spine, I have very little faith in the NHS.

Yes - a reorganisation/redesign is needed. Universal/single payer healthcare is more economically effective, overall, for a nation but it needs to be structured well.

My mum has spent about as much time in hospital this year as out of it and every time you couldn't have asked for more. Aside from the patient food was a bit shit, but it was completely edible

@OneTC I would love to know the health authority you are in. I would definitely consider moving!

It's bloody unfair isn't it @StormzyintheSW ?
I get the feeling that if you live near a large teaching hospital (I've read great things about JR in oxford for instance) you'll have a much better time. We seem to get the dregs down here.

It has been restructured again and again. My aunt, who did a lot of good in her NHS role, just left because there is about to be yet another restructure. She left when she (and hundreds of people she worked with) was told to reapply for her job. It's a waste of time and vast amounts of money.

The problem has been identified for years. Senior NHS staff have told us what it is again and again. Reports have been published by independent bodies. It is austerity, removal of VAST amounts of money from the system. The response has been to restructure in order to make overwhelmed employees do more with less.

I worked in Europe for years (three different countries) until Brexit voters upended my life. I never once had problem accessing healthcare. Western European countries mostly have public-private partnerships for providing public services. The companies are very strictly regulated. The reason things work is that they are stable. Our problem is constant restructuring, funding decreases, and chaos. While there's restructuring going on, no one is focusing on providing care.

East Surrey hospital in Redhill. On reflection there was one stay that wasn't great but that's because they didn't have space on a regular ward so she was in some ward attached to A&E with a very high patient turnover that was noisy and full pelt 24/7.

I was in hospital with pneumonia and a collapsed lung, the shower room was absolutely caked in black mould, the whole ceiling was black. The longest I've ever not washed.

People saying complain and report are not taking into consideration the effects of PTSD. The only person I told was my husband, who had to check it wasn’t some sort of medically induced hallucination, because it was so unbelievable an incident. I wasn’t able to tell anyone because I was so traumatised. I was still frightened by the terrible people who had been running and working in the ICU of the private hospital I was in. It took me 10 years to tell my mum, who was horrified. I have only ever told 3 people in 15 years. It’s the stuff of films or fiction.

When did it become acceptable to discuss your social life on a ward, or your holiday, or whatever? When did it become OK to speak loudly and critically about a patient so they could hear you? These were nurses in a private hospitals, which were at least clean and comfortable I suppose.

There is no excuse for how these nurses behaved. I was a teacher for 40 years in tough schools, I too have had compassion fatigue, but I never forgot that I was a trained professional who needed to maintain certain standards of behaviour every working hour, no matter how busy I was, or how naughty or needy the child was, or how difficult a parent was being - It was a matter of professional pride.

I have found this thread so triggering because the contempt shown by so many nurses is a recurring theme. Of course there are some lovely staff, but there are clearly more than enough nurses lacking in compassion and care. The ‘angels’ myth has been busted for sure.

I can’t read anymore.

Horrible experience during induction with ds 9 years ago.
It is 90%of the reason why I had only one child.

Claremont Private Hospital in Sheffield is brilliant.Ive had two private surgeries there and the staff and food are brilliant.I had 5 choices of top quality food for each of the three courses!

My mum had to stay in hospital recently. There were lots of elderly women on her ward, some with bad dementia. The night staff were recording the dementia patients shouting for help and playing it back, screeching with laughter all night (one of the non dementia patients went out to see what was going on, so witnessed it all) I wish I was lying but this is the level of disgusting behaviour going on.

Please help your mum to put in a complaint if at all possible, @Andanotherone01. It may be like adding a piece to a puzzle if others have expressed concerns. You might be supporting a desperate staff member who has tried to report.