"Accident and Emergency experience with a 93 year…"

I attended Accident and Emergency with my frail 93 year old mother, who is diabetic, partially sighted, needs the assistance of a frame to walk, and very deaf. She normally lives alone with the support of carers 2-3 times a week, and I happened to be visiting from the north of England, due home that day. She had caught her arm on the bed, tearing a 3cm strip of skin off, which needed steristrips and the combined efforts of two nurses to bring the edges together. The extent of the injury was beyond what I could deal with at home without any equipment, and I thought her doctor's practice would refuse to see her, so we came straight to Accident and Emergency. Although she was seen for initial assessment within 15 minutes, we had to wait 5 hours for her treatment. In this time my mother refused to drink anything because she doesn't like using public toilets, and at no stage were we given any indication that it would have been this long. My husband could have gone away to do something useful if he'd known, but having found the signage to the Accident and Emergency dept so bad, and having found a place to park, he didn't dare leave the car because he thought we might be out soon. During our wait numerous people came in and were seen first, mostly considerably younger than my mother, apparently because they had made an appointment by calling 111. I didn't know that was possible for an injury like this, and I felt that the lack of attention to my elderly mother during this long wait, sat on hard metal seating, with no member of staff coming to check on her, was unacceptable. When she did eventually receive treatment, multiple steristrips and a dressing, with instructions to soak them off in 12 days, no spare dressing was given, and no arrangement to contact her doctor for follow up was made. Her blood sugar was not checked. I had to buy spare dressings for her on the way home because blood was already oozing through the dressing. I am a retired General Practitioner, and I feel that the level of treatment she received, and the time taken to be seen (which I gather is not unusual) was unacceptable. The poor signage for people unfamiliar with the hospital layout who wanted to drop someone elderly off by car (my husband eventually found the Accident and Emergency drop off point) was below the standard that I would expect, and disorientating.