"Birmingham Childrens Outpatients"

We’ve visited the children’s hospital outpatients department several times since becoming parents, mostly with our son who has regular ENT appointments, and I have to say I think it is an awful awful department.

Not the staff or the care, but the system itself. It doesn’t not support parents visiting with toddlers who get bored easily and don’t understand sitting in a single coloured area, or children who want to visit the toilet every 10 minutes, staff call names from respective doorways, but don’t shout very loudly in an echoey noisey room, they don’t come to a central point to call or observe where you might be chasing around a child.

They also don’t seem to keep track of who’s next in their clinics, we have three times been weighed or seen in audiology and then been completely missed off the doctors list- once when I had to bring both my toddler and a new born on my own due to a last minute appointment being made. Staff were apologetic but nothing has changed to try and improve the systems or avoid this.

And the system for taking blood is dreadful. There’s never been anyone at the desk when we’ve had to go for bloods. Usually they take ten minutes or more to arrive to give out tickets to wait to be called. Surely there must be a better way?