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"poor communication and stressed staff"

About: St Thomas' Hospital (London)

I have recently been into hospital for rare condition. Pheocromocytoma. The ward was clean, cleaners were utterly dedicated & what I saw impressed me so much, they worked really efficiently & quickly. The toilets were not kept clean overnight at due to staff not being there & the fact that nurses allowed bed pans to be left there without being disposed of. This seemed to be because the patients had been told that their waste had to be weighed or recorded. However, I overheard nurses saying that they had just counted faeces, not weighed or that they had just charted a quantity. It made going to the toilet highly unpleasant prior to cleaners arriving. Nurses overall were wonderful. Dedicated and caring. However, the stress was palpable. I overheard far too many times, nurses blaming each other for things that had not been completed. A nurse moaning that my lost identity bracelet had not been replaced by another nurse. I told them to do it, why hasn't it been done, they exclaimed to a colleague whilst administering my drugs. It did not get replaced until my penultimate day & only because I told a nurse what I had seen and heard. It was a childish and unprofessional way to behave. These two nurses continued to snipe at each other during my stay. The same older nurse refused to administer a drug that I brought to the hospital with me & have taken for 23 years. This occured because my drugs chart went missing when I was moved from critical care to the ward. They quickly sought a doctor to write up a new one but this doctor relied on me as a post operative slightly out of it patient,to tell her doses of drugs I was taking. In listing them, they left off the drug & therefore, no one would administer it despite me telling them that it would seriously affect me. I had to complain & push the point over and over until 24 hours later, it was finally dispensed. One thing that was difficult was that rounds occured hours before relatives were allowed to visit. This meant that in my morphine enduced state, I was unable to understand everything clearly. I only had one visit from my surgeon & no visit at all from my specialist team. This was awful for my condition. Having such a major operation is bad enough but when the huge amount of suffering is caused by hormonal/steroid enduced emotional and mental pain, then help is desperately needed.There wasn't any then and still isn't, 6 days later as I write this. There was a terrible lack of understanding as to what I'd had done, unnecessary glucose tests were performed every 4 hours which were not req, although I have no idea why. A broad misunderstanding of my condition, a lack of information about what drugs I was taking, a complete disregard of me informing them that my drug intervals were incorrect (despite specialist nurse prepping me for weeks prior to surgery), a lack of communication with my specialist endocrine team, a lack of visits from doctors who I knew. Then home with no support whatsoever.

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