Parkside Hospital 2017-12-27 Person 2 5 0

To start with the good points, the hospital is immaculately clean, has free parking and tea / coffee in the waiting rooms. Reception in outpatients is chaotic and too busy with long queues. Everything is done by paper so every visit means a pile of new forms and another swipe of the credit card. While an inpatient, the nursing staff were unresponsive to the call buttons, leaving patients calling out for help from their rooms for ages. Even the good reviews I've read mention how unresponsive they are! They were also unable to find the doctor on duty for a while when my blood pressure crashed (I lost consciousness) and the nursing staff didn't seem to know what to do - note that the nurse had found me losing consciousness only because she was on her rounds and was totally unaware I had pushed the call button 5 minutes earlier when I started feeling faint. There were a couple of excellent nurses there (one in post-op and another who was called in by the nurses to respond) but they were definitely in the minority. I was also impressed with the regularity of monitoring post-op and the leg cuffs to avoid DVT. The nursing staff were not at all gentle and no consideration was given to how much pain they were causing when moving me or pushing antibiotics etc through the cannula in my hand. After my operation, I was given no painkillers except paracetamol and ibuprofen! I know it's a small thing but every time a nurse came in to run the checks through the night, they would turn the light on and forget to turn it back off. As the switch was behind me, it was very hard for me to turn it back off myself - particularly strapped up to a drip and the leg cuffs. Parkside is the kind of private hospital that reminds you how great the NHS hospitals are...