"Excellent staff, great hygiene and good food at Musgrave Park"

I stayed on Wd 5 for investigations which meant I ended up being in for almost a month, so had plenty of time to make assessments on the Ward, and I have to give it a huge thumbs up. Despite being an old ward in an old building, the staff work to ensure you are as comfortable as possible. It's an old style ward with bays on both sides for part of the corridor and side rooms at the top end. It was a wonderfully relaxed ward with staff not pushing people to wake up at 6.30 unless they had to, and I often managed to sleep in all the way through to breakfast (despite that being held in my bay!).

The ward was extremely busy when I was admitted so I got put into a bed in the "overflow" area at the very top of the ward, where the meal tables were. But once the other couple of patients who'd come in the same time as me went home (within 3 days), I found I thoroughly enjoyed the solitude of being on my own up there, as I was in a lot of pain and not up to talking to people much, so really appreciated that.

Despite being out of the way somewhat, the staff didn't ignore me or miss checking I was okay, as technically I wasn't ill as such, and I could have understood somewhat had they not bothered as much as they did. If anything, a couple of the nurses went to incredible lengths to try and ease my pain and problems as best they could.

I enjoyed the meals which were perfectly edible and the salads in particular were superb, and there was plenty of variety even over the 4 weeks.

The ward was kept very clean and the nurses did all the bed cleaning to an extremely high standard - taking anything up to 30 mins+ to clean a mattress in between patients and longer again to complete the entire bed area - definitely very encouraging.

Overall, out of all the local hospitals in Belfast I have to give them 10/10 for their standards of hygiene and care. Better than some hotels that's for sure!