"Understanding Children with additional needs"

Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback on your daughter’s visit to our Accident and Emergency (A&E) Department. We do aim to offer our patients the highest standards of care and we must apologise if we have fallen short of those standards on this occasion. We welcome all feedback and would like to assure you that all comments are taken seriously and acted upon as part of our on-going commitment to improving patient experience. Your comments have shown a standard of care we would not expect for our patients and we would like to apologise wholeheartedly to both you and your daughter. In our dedicated paediatric area of A&E we have paediatric trained nurses whose skills are regularly updated, including training in communicating with patients in challenging circumstances. It is, therefore, extremely disappointing to read about your negative experience. We must apologise if you felt the doctor who saw your daughter was insensitive and appeared to dismiss your comments about her level of communication and pain threshold. However, we hope you understand that we have an obligation to take particular notice of children who have an unusually high number of hospital visits and we would always try to establish the reason for this. It is considered best practice to speak to the child themselves rather than their parents. Although we appreciate that you explained the reason for your daughter’s silence, our staff must err on the side of caution and prioritise safety. There is, however, an appropriate way to go about asking these questions and there is no excuse for rudeness or a bad attitude. If patients have difficulty communicating, we have a number of specialist resources including an illustrated communication book and toolkit. These tools should have been offered to your daughter and we can only apologise that this did not happen. We have a Hospital Passport which may be a useful tool for your daughter to complete at home and bring with her if she comes into hospital in the future. The passport was designed for patients with learning disabilities but would be beneficial for any patient with additional needs. You can download a copy of the passport from our website: http://dudleygroup.nhs.uk/hospitalpassport/ Unfortunately, we are bound by regulations that state we are unable to perform X-rays not specified by the doctor requesting the scan. We must apologise that your daughter’s elbow injury was not reviewed by the doctor. We are concerned by the points you have raised and, with your permission, we would like to register this as a formal complaint so that we can carry out a thorough investigation. In order to do this, please contact our complaints team by emailing Complaints.Dept@dgh.nhs.uk or phoning 01384 321035. In the meantime, we have passed your feedback onto the matron and clinical director for A&E and they will reinforce with their staff the importance of appropriate communication.