"cleanliness. staff. Once I was ..."

What I liked

cleanliness. staff. Once I was actually admitted everything went very efficiently.

Because this is a specialist hospital you know you are seeing someone very experienced in their field and their results are good and infection rates very low.

What could be improved

The hospital is really let down by its very bad clerical communications.

My admission was cancelled with 3 weeks notice and brought forward giving me 1 week's notice of admission. No reason was given which i found unacceptable and when i queried this i was told that due to confidentiality i could not be given the reason. This was clearly untrue, and after several phone calls i was told that more urgent cases (cancer) needed to be got in. I was happy with this, and telling me this at the outset would have prevented my considerable anger and raised blood pressure at the time.

Also when I said I could not keep the re-arranged earlier admission date I was told that this would mean me waiting some months for another date...as though I was being punished. After complaining again about this information I was given another appropriate date which I accepted and then some days later yet another appointment arrived for a few weeks later (not a few months) which, again, if i had been given in the first place I would never have had to complain.

The appointments system and staff need to be tightened up on procedure, and patients need to be given more information and if an appointment is cancelled they should be given an alternative after discussion with them.

Anything else?

When you are seen in outpatients it is often not a doctor who sees you. You should be told this both in advance and at the time. The person seeing you should clearly introduce themselves to you and tell you their role.

Overall my experience of appointments. investigations and operative procedures were good and i would not choose to go anywhere else for orthopaedic surgery. However the hospital does seriously fail in its communications.