"Excellent care that resulted in the safe delivery..."

What I liked

I was admitted to LGH as an emergency in December 2011 just 5 weeks before my due date. I cannot fault the care that i was given from the minute i arrived on the delivery suite. I was quickly diagnosed with a placental abruption and within 20 minutes of arriving was in theatre.

My daughter was born 45 minutes later and was taken to neonatal intensive care.

The care and attention i received from the midwives was impeccable. I was visited by many of the staff involved in my inital assessment and delivery in the days after my daughter was born and this touched me tremendously, it was lovely to know that the staff genuinely cared about both myself and my daughter and went out of their way to find me.

The Care on the neonatal unit was also fantastic, my daughter was in there all over Christmas and this was extremely hard but little touches like a visit from santa made it all the more bearable.

My only negative experience was when i was discharged. It took 6 hours to sort out my discharge and this was because i went to find out what was happening and was told i had not been noted as a discharge on that day. It was also alarming to learn that despite seeing a doctor or registrar every day my hospital notes had not been updated since my day of admission some 6 days previous. The ward did seem short on staff at times and on several occasions when requesting pain relief etc i was informed that there was only 1 or 2 midwives on the the ward that evening.

Ultimately the staff do their best but as with most maternity care the shortage of midwives is evident and i can only hope that the powers that be recognise how important these roles are and take postive action in the future to recruit and improve the care provided.

Overall a postive experience despite it being the week before Christmas.

What could be improved

The procedure for discharging patients.

More care needs to be taken when issuing drugs.

Patient records should be upadated daily.

Anything else?

I would definately not hestiate in using the General again.