Hospitals

[Bri w]

I've worked in the NHS, and been a supplier to it for 20+ years. When I was still on the tools I could be working in any of the clinical areas, including theatres when they are operating. Going into the environment for professional reasons is just the same as you going to the office. Going in as a patient comes with the added problem of knowing some of what's going on but don't really understand all the clinical implications... a bit anxious at times. And in equal measure, understanding how good some clinicians are, and the level of monitoring involved, gives confidence.

Visiting a relative is easier in so much as I don't freak at the sound of alarms going off, or the sight of wires and tubes. I make a point of looking at the charts, and drug charts and asking questions. It allays the patient's mind and the other relative's too.

From the perspective of quality of care, things have improved dramatically in the last 10 years, although if you believe the media you wouldn't think so. The only real failing in the NHS now is scale. It's not big enough to cope with the population in this country but once inside, i.e. in hospital, it's damn good.

[phi-dan]

I've never liked hospitals - all comes from some bad experiences when I was very small, which makes it the more odd that I work for one now!
When I worked on the wards, all the bad feelings would come back, but it was a job so I just had to get over it. Fortunately, I'm office based now. Having to go to other departments to visit family / friends is still pretty rough tho, especially when I forget to take off my ID badge - "Oh, you work in IT, while you're here can you look at the ward computer / telephone / random piece of equipment with a plug on it?"

[Jayneflakes]

I have been in and out of hospital for a lot of my life due to being a sickly ill type most of the time. Most embarrassing though was the RUH in Bath, after a nasty MTB crash left me with internal bleeding and there was only one hole they wanted to look up! I was not at all happy!

What really upset me was when my severely mentally ill best friend was admitted to the RUH after a suicide attempt, the Doctor stitching up her arms after she cut her wrists was both callous and cruel and it left me traumatised and upset for a long time. I dread to think how much damage it did to my already severely poorly friend.

I was booked into a Nuffield Hospital for specialist surgery, despite actually being an NHS patient, in 2006. I was shocked at the state of the place and came out with Ring worm and a bacterial infection.

I have to say, I hate hospitals, I have been in too many and most recently spent some time in BRI visiting my friend after his crash. As much as I dislike the places, they kept him alive and rebuilt him, so I also have a lot of respect for what they did.

[Kenzie]

Not a big fan of them, but been an outpatient for a couple of years because a blood problem. I had menegitus when I was young, I've split my eyebrow open when I was one and had pnemonia in '03. I don't trust GPs though. When my blood problem first surfaced he said nothing was wrong, this was June 09. It wasn't until July 2011 that he said after repeated visits that he didn't have a clue and refered me. Also, a GP cost my great great gran her life, he visited her and said she had a cold or something. Next day she was admitted with pneumonia and died the day after.

Originally Posted by Jayneflakes

What really upset me was when my severely mentally ill best friend was admitted to the RUH after a suicide attempt, the Doctor stitching up her arms after she cut her wrists was both callous and cruel

Doctors and nurses can be pretty harsh when they don't agree with what you did to get the injury they are treating. I crashed when I was young wearing jeans and a denim jacket. I lost all the skin of my right hand side, foot, calf, thigh, hip, stomach and chest. It was a 2-3 hour job for the nurse to clean up the gravel rash, and she gave me no sympathy at all, and wasn't exactly gentle about it. By the end of it I was biting on a wooden handle and repeatedly puking.

Originally Posted by Kenzie

I don't trust GPs though.

Oh! + 3 million! The very title General Practitioner should be ringing alarm bells if you have anything more than a common illness.

[gruntygiggles]

Watched too many loved ones pass on in hospitals but am mostly greatful for the service they have provided.

If you see lots of people you love die, it is not uncommon for some of those deaths to be tragic and totally unecessary. In these situations, I have only seen the good side of hospitals and their staff.

When it was my little cousin, I couldn't leave her after she passed. She was just lying there, looking like a China doll and the nurse said it would be about an hour before she was taken to the morgue. I sat there for the hour and each time that nurse walked through the room, she would put a hand on my shoulder as she passed. She knew I didn't want Ellen to be alone, but she didn't want me to be alone.

On the flip side, when my grampy passed on, the whole family wanted to string the doctor up. Grampy had been on warfarin (sp) for over 40 years so when a stomach ulcer ruptured, he bled out. The nurse was fantastic but after doing 4 sheet changes, he wasn't allowed to do any more, so we had to see how much blood was being lost and all the places it was coming from. He was also in so much pain that every 30 seconds, his knees would be up under his chin. For two hours we watched this. We begged for morphine, the doctor was on routine rounds and had to come see grampy before signing it off as to give morphine, he would have needed more blood as not enough in his body. He had already had 8units and doctor didn't want to "waste" more when it would not change the outcome.
So...a man who served his country and as a result lived a lifetime full of ill health was not given enough respect to be allowed to die peacefully and pain free...for the sake of one more unit of blood to carry some morphine around. We, as a family have to live with our last memory of grampy being more traumatic than anything I have seen portrayed in any film or tv show...because it was so easily avoidable.

Then, there is an argument my other cousin Elly could have been saved. As she was 14, they assumed it was meningitis and started treatment straight away. It was a brain hemorrhage so had they scanned on admission, she could have been saved possibly, but that is just one of those things.

I accept that sometimes people get it wrong...I accept that things aren't always black and white and that symptoms can be very difficult to read so I don't blame the hospital for Elly dying. It was just a tragedy.

As much as i carry anger over the fact Ellen should have been on a children's ward not an adult cardiac ward or that she should have been admitted before she got to 4st and her eye popped out of the socket...I accept that when someone literally stops eating and goes from 10st to 4st in 6 months, there is little to be done...so I am just grateful she got the treatment she did in the end.

I hate that we need them, I sometimes hate that there are the very few in them, as in my grandads case who can be so cold as to deny a dying man a bit of comfort and dignity, but on the whole...I will always be grateful for hospitals and those who work in them. They do a job I don't think I could cope with.

I kind of understand what you went through with your grandfather Cheryl.

Not in terms of allowing people to suffer, but in terms of blood coming from everywhere.

My father died from an internal heomorrage (sp) as the result of a DVT blood clot wearing through the wall of a main artery. Before the bleeding started he was in hospital doubled over with the pain and it was initially wrongly diagnosed as crones disease and they operated and removed part of his bowel. He didn't recover and a few days later his blood pressure dropped away as he started to bleed. They were pumping blood in via transfusion, as fast as they were mopping it up as it bled from the operation incision in his stomach. They were mopping it up using large absorbent santiary towel type material, and it was dripping onto the floor each time they changed the towels and dropped them into a wheelie bin next to the bed (every 10 minutes). We were walking in it and leaving bloody footprints on the floor. The sheer quantity of blood transfused gave him septicaemia and one by one all his organs ceased to function. Over the following week they managed to thicken his blood and stop the bleeding (they couldn't physically stop it as it was behind his liver and they couldn't find it and he couldn't survive any more operations), he was recovering from the septicaemia and his blood pressure was up, doctors started to talk about a 6-12 month recovery plan, rather than whether or not he would be alive the next day. That night the clot blew like a champagne cork with his blood pressure rising, and he died within the hour of internal bleeding.

The ITU unit were absolutely fantastic in the care he received and the efforts they went to to try and keep him alive, but I refused to leave his bedside, and in hindsight I would have been better off not seeing the worst of the bleeding. It's a difficult call to tell a relative that they can't stay by the bedside of a dying relative, but in those circumstances, I don't think I should have been allowed to stay.

[appollo1]

Originally Posted by -Ralph-

The very title General Practitioner should be ringing alarm bells if you have anything more than a common illness.

It is not just GP's that you should be concerned about. Consultants who are supposed to be at the top of their "trade" can also be cr4p.

A few years ago my wife had to have surgery to remove gall stones. at the time keyhole surgery was unavailable and she was told that open surgery would leave her with a 6cm scar. LIAR the scar is 8" long and has been sewn up badly leaving the scar very "lumpy".

My wife also required surgery on her wrist (different consultant this time). the surgery has left her with a horrible scar on her wrist and as the procedure was not done properly the first time she had to have more work done on the same part of the wrist through the same scar. When she was in hospital i stayed with her for both operations and one of the times she was getting prepped to go to theatre so i went off to the cafe to get something to eat. as i was returning to the ward i passed the consultant who was going for his lunch and he told me that the surgery had been a great success and my wife was recovering. she must have had a miraculous recovery as when i returned to the ward she was still waiting to go to theatre!!! stupid man had been talking about someone else!

It turned out that due to him not getting the procedure correct after 3 attempts (yes she had to go in again for the same thing) she is now awaiting another appointment tahnkfully this time with a different consultant who appears to be better, but if it doesn't work this time then her wrist will have to be fused which means she will have no rotation in her wrist and minimal movement in it

i dont like hospitals or consultants.

[gruntygiggles]

Originally Posted by -Ralph-

I kind of understand what you went through with your grandfather Cheryl.

Not in terms of allowing people to suffer, but in terms of blood coming from everywhere.

My father died from an internal heomorrage (sp) as the result of a DVT blood clot wearing through the wall of a main artery. Before the bleeding started he was in hospital doubled over with the pain and it was initially wrongly diagnosed as crones disease and they operated and removed part of his bowel. He didn't recover and a few days later his blood pressure dropped away as he started to bleed. They were pumping blood in via transfusion, as fast as they were mopping it up as it bled from the operation incision in his stomach. They were mopping it up using large absorbent santiary towel type material, and it was dripping onto the floor each time they changed the towels and dropped them into a wheelie bin next to the bed (every 10 minutes). We were walking in it and leaving bloody footprints on the floor. The sheer quantity of blood transfused gave him septicaemia and one by one all his organs ceased to function. Over the following week they managed to thicken his blood and stop the bleeding (they couldn't physically stop it as it was behind his liver and they couldn't find it and he couldn't survive any more operations), he was recovering from the septicaemia and his blood pressure was up, doctors started to talk about a 6-12 month recovery plan, rather than whether or not he would be alive the next day. That night the clot blew like a champagne cork with his blood pressure rising, and he died within the hour of internal bleeding.

The ITU unit were absolutely fantastic in the care he received and the efforts they went to to try and keep him alive, but I refused to leave his bedside, and in hindsight I would have been better off not seeing the worst of the bleeding. It's a difficult call to tell a relative that they can't stay by the bedside of a dying relative, but in those circumstances, I don't think I should have been allowed to stay.

Yep...it was horriffic with Grampy too. A Scene that perhaps only you and a few others with similar experience could imagine as it was far worse than I would have pictured if someone had sold me about it rather than seeing it for myself. When you watch someone you love bleeding profusely from every orifice, even his eyes and in so much pain that he was doubled up, it is a living nightmare. We all wondered if we should stay, there were 12 of us in that room with him and any time any one of us wanted to walk out for a break, he would hold his hand out. He knew he didn't have long but he wanted to be near to us and we wanted to be near to him. Over the years, those memories seem more clinical now and I remember him as I should, in his chair with his hearing aid alarm going off randomly, the TV on almost top volume, moaning about Maggie Thatcher

On the flip side, when I sat with Ellen, I actually wanted all my family to come and see her just before she was taken to the morgue. I have a picture in my mind of her that none of them have and I will be eternally grateful for it. When she died, she was literally like a skeleton with skin dragged over it. Her arms were covered in black hairs despite her being such a pale complexion. Her eyes were sunken and one wasn't quite right after it had come out. She looked awful, more like 60 than 16. But...in just that one hour, her complexion became almost wax like. It took on a yellowy hue and the hairs seemed to disappear. Even her eyes looked not as bad and all the red marks on her face and hands completely disappeared. She really did look like a doll and I remember that. When I said my last goodbye and gave her a kiss and held her hand, her skin was smooth again as I remembered it when she was healthy, so I have that and am grateful for it.

I wish I had been allowed to go and see Elly after she died as she looked the same, but she and I were only 14 at the time and my mum and dad didn't think it would be right. Perhaps they were right, but I still can't believe she isn't coming back!

[Biker Biggles]

Originally Posted by BanannaMan

Sorry to hear about all your relatives.
Could be worse, they could be in a US hospital which would also cost them a ton of money.
I hate Hospitals btw.

Dont worry we are hot on your heels.Give this government a full term in office and we will be right up there with the US system.