"Filthy hospital, bullying doctors."

What could be improved

I was accompanying a friend who had been throwing up for the past five days. As she was unable to keep anything down, she was throwing up bile and dehydrated. We waited for 4 hours in the corridor before we were assigned a room. We asked for a saline drip on three occasions and didn't manage to get it.

We weren't seen by a doctor until five hours later. The first thing he did was aggressively ask my friend "Well, what have you got that is so much of an emergency that you need to call an ambulance?" My friend explained that she had chronic low potassium and that she was feeling the same symptoms that she felt when she nearly died a year ago, and had been told by her doctor then to go straight to A&E if it ever happened again. The doctor seemed more interested in listening to his walkie talkie than to her. He kept saying that this wasn't an emergency and that she should go to her GP for this. When we asked at what point was it considered an emergency he refused to give us an answer and just insisted we contact our GP.

Nobody goes to A&E for fun and giggles. Nobody (despite what doctors might think) wants to be in A&E. I am quite sure we would rather be at home, healthy. This doctor's attitude was abhorrent. His bullying a very sick person says very little of the profession.

Also, there was only one nurse who was doing anything. The rest were milling about aimlessly, trying to look very busy while they did nothing at all.

We will definitely not be going back to this A&E as it was filthy, unprofessional and I refuse to let my friend (or myself if it comes to that) be bullied by doctors who decide to take out their personal stress on sick patients.