"Plus and minus @ Dracula's Castle"

The Plus # 1 Plenty of parking Minus is # 2 Parking like all Trusts in England now do, quite wrongly charged for, if the NHS is free so is parking, we are not talking about people abusing this site to do some shopping. # 3 Pedestrian access is (expletive deleted) there is no designated path for pedestrians, the motorist rules you risk getting run over by entering the site exactly because there is no separation between cars and people Why is there not a wider entrance and a physical barrier and designated walk ways # 4 It is not obvious from the website that there is a walk in blood test centre at Purley (not that I could find) # 5 The signage for the blood test centre is IMHO rubbish If memory serves the signage at Mayday is a proper job It was not immediately obvious what you need to do. The whole thing revolves around word of mouth. The sign telling you to take a ticket is so small it just as easily could have said "fire alarm" # 6 There is no clock in the waiting room this I presume was taken away because too many patients were becoming aware of how long they had been waiting, ho ho # 7 The Unit was clearly understaffed on the day I visited, as I sat there for about 15 minutes before the nurse returned to resume the queue about 10 on that day, she called 53 54 then next number 63 which means that loosely 10 patients had given up waiting. # 8 Patient confidentiality.was clearly being breached all day long, as the door to the clinical room was wide open and you could hear each patient give their full name and date of birth Apart from that the Nurse was pleasant and a good phlebotomist and was proficient throughout. A Good Phlebotomist is IMHO a rare occurrence, there is in reality a lot of variance from ditherers to total incompetence, I have been bruised, and stabbed on many an occasion. Mayday has been my worst experience. All my good experiences have been at St Heliers which I am prevented from attending due to pure politics. I have visited Purley Xray and had no problems I visited the Ultrascan department and got lumbered with a non communicative individual who had no patient focus whatsoever and was pre occupied with a defective chair and seemed convinced he was going to succumb to a back injury which he could sue the health authority for! This reminds me of the caring GP the day my mother died who said "I have got to pick up my daughter and I am now late" indicating it was all my fault next he said "you need to call the police I can do nothing" So we are all adults here, where is the joined up thinking, where are the support staff who should have known the correct procedure and avoided further stress The NHS is supposed to be about Patient care nee Focus And Patient Choice But what happened to choice There is only 1 God and only one NHS Patients 3 Bureaucrats 0