"It only takes one bad nurse to undermine otherwise..."

What I liked

The doctors I met, the consultant, the consultant and second anaesthetist were very polite, informative and kind. Both porters i met were friendly and fun and distracted my fears. The physios and OTs were polite, understanding and caring. All thes people were in essence excellent, but let down by the ward staff subsequently.

What could be improved

Breakfast is poor and inadequate.

Water supply to immobile patients should be treated as a priority and wasn't, hindering recovery.

No help offered to wash post op, so returned home after 48 hours dirty. Blood stained bed linen not changed. Inadequate bedding to keep warm,. Needs to be less laziness and more work on basic needs.

Poor team work with disagreements over treatment plans.Trashing of doctors plan by a moody and unpleasant nurse.

Excessive lengthy personal chit chats going on at nurses stations, disrupting to sleep with some confidential discussions about individual patients (inclusive of sarcasm and dislikes of certain patients) overheard as no awareness by the nurses that with open room doors loud voicse are very clearly overheard. Some arguments went on between nursing staff one night.

Nurse not entitled to prescribe offering to change medicines prescribed by doctor and pharmacist- what do you fancy, including offering a drug given only as a pre-med. Outrageous and dangerous.

Nurse arguing over treatment, treatment plan, the surgical procedure, criticising everyone from the consultant and anaesthetists downward through the reahbilitation staff and making her own decisions to remove pateints from the ward who have otherwise not been told they are discharged. Insisting that anything slowing the recovery process down, like for me an anaesthetic which was slow to wear off leaving me immobile for longer was my fault and I should have prevented the anaesthetists from giving me the drugs in the first place and not prepared to let this drop.

There must be some means for an immobile pateint scared of a nurse overnight to contact the duty manager without her knowledge, for example some sort of alarm which bypasses the nurse's station, especially for immobile or restricted patients.

Nurses must stick within their competencies and follow treatment plans

Poor communication makes discharge long and distressing, must improve.

Anything else?

If so much laziness is possible on the ward when there are so many staff doing nothing, then there are too many staff, so here is a very easy way for the NHS to save money- just sack the ones with nothing to do or who can't be asked to do and leave a few with enough to do to warrant an honest day's pay. Get teams working together, sack the loose canons , people will get better quicker and probably mortality rates will plummet. Make grumpy frustrated nurses multiskilled so they aren't bored and damaging.