"Staff do bare minimum if that!!"

Anything else?

We had the displeasure of spending almost a month at the LRI with our sick baby. Having been transferred from our local hospital to LRI I do have a comparison of how other childrens nurses work. We believe that the nurses are board line professional and really do the bare minimum and seem to be totally lacking in compassion. We never at any point felt we could leave our babies room as we had no confidence that the staff would notice if anything went wrong. A baby in the room next to us was left to cry for hours on end without staff, and I would pop in to give the baby it's dummy and comfort and no member of staff ever would notice, but we couldn't just sit in our room listening to a small baby crying. We were on ward 12 (HDU), so did think the staff would be attentive, however when any alarm went off in the room we would always have to go in search for a nurse to reset and investigate. Once the alarm went off to say my babies fluids had ran out, after finally finding a nurse she turned it off and said she would go for another bag - in the end it was 4 hours until the fluids were finally re started, (our baby was not feeding so the fluids were the only thing our baby was having!). Continuously when the sats monitor alarmed to show our babies oxygen levels were dropping, or heart rate was high, we would have to find staff and they would come into the room and turn the monitoring off - saying they are not very accurate!!! Never would they investigate, even though our baby has a serious heart defect. We felt like we were an annoyance as we had to always track down staff to reset the alarms, in the end they showed us how to silence and reset the alarms. When we said we would rather know why they where going off, they told us not to worry we would know if something serious was going on!! On several occasions our babies canuala tissued, because they just didn't check , and it was always us that would have to point it out. To be honest when we were first admitted in ward 10, and the wrong name tags were attached to our baby we should have know there and then what sort of care we were going to receive. I will refuse to ever go back to LRI if it is ever suggested again on the future.