Broomfield Hospital 2014-05-03 Person 4 5 0

The hospital is welcoming, light and airy and has paintings on the walls. Staff, with only one exception, are hard-working, caring, approachable and helpful. On several occasions the administration has not proved brilliant. For example: I received a letter to tell me to go to theatre for admission at 7.30am for breast surgery. On arrival I was told I should go down to the Breast Unit for a scan and a wire to be put into my breast to aid the surgeon in finding the tumour. I had been told about this but received no advice letter regarding this. When I went down there at 7.40pm I was told as it was a Thursday there would be no-one in to do the wire etc until 8.45/9.00am. In other words I had to get up very early just to wait around. This could have been avoided if the admissions letter had taken account of this process and the times relevant staff come to work. Also: I had to go for a second pre-anaesthetic appointment and was asked to go and get my ECG results, which they had never received from the cardiac dept. the first time. I was told to ask for a printout from their records. I went as instructed and was told sharply by the receptionist that it was my fault that the pre-anaesthetic dept hadn't received the results as I should have taken them over at the time! I pointed out that I'd been totally unaware of this as no-one had mentioned it at the time. Then I asked if I could have a print-out of the records & then told sharply that "no, we don't keep records, we record over them." or words to that effect. So I had to wait for another ECG. When I went in and explained to the nurse she said that, not that wasn't the process, usually they are all put in a tray and at the end of the day someone from pre-anaesthetic comes and collects them all. This made complete sense to me. I had the second ECG and walked the results back over to Pre-anaesthetic personally. This was all rather surprising and unsatisfactory, particularly being spoken to as I was by the receptionist in Cardiac, as if it was my fault that the results hadn't got to Pre-anaesthetic nearly three weeks later, let alone in time for my first surgery which was two days after the initial ECG.