"Excellent care in ICU & Ward 16"

Many thanks for taking the time to provide us with some feedback on your husband’s recent experience at the RVI. We are pleased that you felt the surgery and after care on ICU and Ward 16 was so positive. It is always great when we are reminded of the quality of the care we provide and we will ensure this is fed back to the teams who we know will be very appreciative.

However, we are sorry that you found the admission process and pre-op experience as a less positive experience and fully appreciate how anxious a time this can be for patients and family alike. While we do have patients scheduled onto the operating theatre list and we try to organise things accordingly this can be affected by the unexpected complexity of cases earlier on the list and also by emergencies that require immediate responses from the surgeons, theatre staff and anaesthetics.

Unfortunately disruptions to the schedule create some uncertainty as to when or how long a patient may have to wait until they can expect to proceed with their procedure. However we would always want to ensure that patients are fully informed both about the procedure itself and an indication of when it is likely to take place. We can only apologise for the uncertainty and anxiety this will have caused in your husband’s experience and we have asked the admission team and their surgical and anaesthetic colleagues to review this situation to identify if there are better ways to keep patients informed and made aware of these kind of situations.

In respect of parking charges, the RVI Multi-storey was privately owned until very recently and the Trust are progressing with standardisation of parking charges. The daily rate on surface car parks is £7.20 per day and this will be reflected in all car parks as new infrastructure is installed by the end of February 2016. We do offer concessions for patients who are likely to stay in for long-term care which start at £21 per week (£3 per day equivalent).