North Locality 2017-05-02 Person 0 5 0

My 2-year old grandson had what appeared to be some sort of bite or burn on his wrist, which looked very red and inflamed. He lives in France and he, his mother and his baby brother were staying with my husband and I at the time. My registered GP practice was unable to help, and instructed us to go to the Urgent Care Centre at Crawley Hospital. We did so on the morning of Tues 25.04.17. My husband waited in our car with my daughter’s 6-month old baby. I accompanied my daughter and grandson into the UCC, where they were checked in at Reception and saw the triage nurse almost straightaway which gave us some optimism. The nurse looked briefly at the wound and immediately said my grandson would need to be seen by the doctor and she took us to a room she referred to as the "children's waiting room" and told us to wait. Our experience in this room was awful. It was completely separate and isolated from other areas of the centre. If you left the room, you couldn't get back in unless you managed to find a member of staff to let you in again. There were two children waiting with their parents to be seen before us, and they told us they had already been waiting a very long time. There was nothing in the room except some chairs around the edge of the room: there were no toys, nothing for a child to do except play on the floor (which was quite dirty), no toilets, no changing facilities, no drinks machine of any kind (not even water). Worse still, there were no staff at all. No information was given to us during the two and a half hours we waited there, no member of staff came into the room at all except to call one child in to see the duty doctor. It was a depressing place to wait for hours, particularly with young children. Eventually one of the parents left the room, found a member of staff and came back to say that she had been told an emergency had come in and that the only doctor on duty had been called to attend it, so the wait for the children to be seen could still be several hours. At this point we had had enough: we (along with the other parents and children in the room) had been waiting an unacceptably long time with no access to facilities, refreshment or children’s activities, and no information. All the children in the room were thoroughly fed up and tired, and they were behaving accordingly. Moreover, my daughter needed to feed and change her baby and this dirty and fractious environment was totally inappropriate. My daughter was by this time dreadfully upset and we left. We felt that the “children’s waiting area” in the Crawley UCC, and the unacceptably long time for a small child to be seen, were an absolute disgrace: it fell very short of what one should reasonably expect of Crawley Hospital UCC. [We successfully sought treatment at the UCC East Surrey Hospital later that day.]