"Bad experiences at Nottingham Hospitals"

I have been a patient at the Queens Medical Hospital and the City Hospital in Nottingham. I found that the procedures for the MRSA prevention were not carried out. As far as I know, there is meant to be hand cream and some body wash given to the patients to go home with to stop any MRSA. Also, I was told that a nasal cream should be given to help prevent the spread of MRSA, this was only given to me once out of the four times that I was admitted. Never was enough of the hand creams, body wash etc available for me to take home. Apparently, patients are meant to use these for three weeks after they have been discharged.

Also there was a patient who had a bug so they were put into a single room next to the bay, but, the door was left open, so any germs could come through to the ward. The nurses did not close the door. I was discharged from the ward, but, was then taken back to the ward because I was ill again and when I went back to the ward, it had to be closed because too many patients had the sickness bug. I think this was because the procedures for stopping it from spreading were not carried out. From what I saw, the bottles that contain the hand wash to prevent the spread of MRSA and other germs were often left empty and not replaced. So nobody could wash their hands properly.

I am also a diabetic type 1 and have an insulin pump. On one occasion, I was left for 28 hours without food; I did not have any breakfast because I was not feeling well. I did not have lunch because I was due to have a procedure, then afterwards I kept asking for food and by then it was 28 hours since I had eaten some food. For a diabetic, type 1, this is very serious.

I think the staff were under pressure because they were understaffed, but, I found some of the staff attitude was appalling. ’this is not my job’ was some of the comments made when I asked for help on some occasions. The atmosphere was also appalling; a nurse could have got another member of staff to help me. Once the sister and another nurse were making a bed and they were swearing as they were talking. I do not expect the ward to be like this. Patients do not want to hear swearing on the ward like this from the nurses.

At times, I was in a lot of pain and one of the nurses very insensitively said, that was because I had sludge in my arteries, this was a very uncaring way of putting it and made me feel terrible. I found her very rude.

Another problem that I experienced was that I was seen by the specialist cardiology nurse, who told me that I had had a heart attack. I was made to feel that it was my fault; I am not over weight, the heart attack was caused by my diabetes and a family history of heart problems. She told me how I could have prevented it and gave me some leaflets that were appalling; the English was very poor and they were very badly designed. The leaflet needs to be appropriately designed, as it seemed to contain the wrong information in it. There was a section about the outpatient programme, see part C, but, there was no part C.

On the ward, there were two teams of nurses and they seemed to be getting at each other and the attitude towards each other was not good. The whole experience made me worried about my aftercare, and I felt very uneasy about dealing with them again. Some of the leaflets that I was given to take home with me were very out of date, the content was not correct. For example, I was given a questionnaire from an ACS nurse concerning health before a heart attack and it said tick the boxes, but, there were no boxes on the leaflets.

As I am an ex-nurse, I found the whole experience very distressing. The medical care from the doctors was quite good, some of the staff were excellent. It was just some of the individuals who were very rude and seemed uncaring.