University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust 2013-09-25 Person 1 5 0

My mother attended SGH for a triple heart bypass. She is 85 years old. Our experience was that the ICU and the Acute Needs wards were great - the staff excellent. The aftercare in the general wards was awful. The wards are squalid, the facilities are out of date and it is not clean. The day room is bare, depressing - with no seating to talk of and no comforts. We witnessed a patient and his visitor smoking in the day room - heads hanging out of the winter. In late July it was intolerably hot. They had to turn the lighting off to reduce the heat. There are insufficient staff especially at weekends and there was little co-ordination or linkage with the team that did the operation or with the subsequent recovery and after care. The extremes that we experienced between great clinical excellence and care at the beginning to conditions that no one should really suffer at the end is hard to fathom.