Watford General Hospital

Watford General Hospital 2016-12-07 Person 5 5 0

Amazing care from the midwives and students in the ABC, they kept both my partner and I reassured and informed during my labour and were always there as little or as much as required

Watford General Hospital 2016-12-04 Person 1 5 0

called 111 at 11am, give an out of hours gp at 8.30 who referred to ae, said they'd be expecting us for bloods (daughter coughing up blood). Doctor seen at 1.30 in morning, witnessed other patients, shout and kick off over wait and seen immediately, kid with hairline fracture, came in over 2 hours after us. Witnessed nurses discussing patients in a very unprofessional manner after they complained. Department was filthy, in 6 hours seen a half hearted attempt for a quick sweep. It stunk of vomit and poo. When eventually seen a doctor, she seemed thorough and had a nice manner.

Watford General Hospital 2016-12-03 Person 1 5 0

Staff were extremely rude. Their 'prioritising' was crazy. Worried enough about an 8 month old babies fast breathing rate to want him to stay but left him in waiting room for hours. Knew he has been fevering, had been given times of last medication but didn't once come to check temperature.... disgusting care from the children's department

Watford General Hospital 2016-11-30 Person 5 5 0

I m happy with everything

Watford General Hospital 2016-11-28 Person 3 5 0

Had a blood test on 21st September and had to wait 7 weeks for the results. This length of time was unacceptable!

Watford General Hospital 2016-11-25 Person 1 5 0

i don' t like how rhey treat you . they don't do good job

Watford General Hospital 2016-11-24 Person 4 5 0

The staff at the Alexandra Birthing a centre were excellent and thoroughly professional throughout my 3 day stay. They treated me with complete respect and dignity and really sought to understand my choices as my labour progressed. Compared to the birth of my first child at a different hospital, the experience at Watford was extremely positive and I am grateful for the excellent staff who looked after me.

Watford General Hospital 2016-11-23 Person 2 5 0

Waited nearly 3 hours and still waiting at 12.50am with 79 year old mother in law after she had a fall. A and e is NOT busy so clearly there is not enough staff for they are totally inefficient. My gut feeling tells me it is more to do with inefficiency as there seems to be plenty of staff walking around doing what seems to be, not a lot. Dreadful and still stuck here. Great not to have a choice.......

Watford General Hospital 2016-11-15 Person 3 5 0

My father has just spent 10 days in AAU (Purple 2 days, Red 8). Overall his care was excellent. He is 88 & cognitively sound. He felt safe, comfortable & told me every day how good the food was - and I agree! All the staff we met - cleaners, housekeeping, porters, nurses, specialists, most doctors...were pleasant, kind & helpful. One or 2 nurses appear to have turned the business of avoiding a concerned relative's eye into an art form! - but given what's below, maybe not so surprising. The thing that really shocked me though, was how much PAPERWORK the nursing staff have to complete! In recent years both my parents have spent the odd week or two in hospital (not Watford), but never before have I witnessed such bureaucracy gone mad! The patient folders are HUGE! Nurses sit at long trestle tables in the ward, studiously filling out mountains of paper. Thank goodness that they do it in the ward (rather than a nurses station), otherwise they'd find it hard to keep an eye on their patients! Just before handover time, there's often a frantic rush by all concerned to get the paperwork up-to-date for the next shift. It's like students rushing to get their homework in on time! Whenever I expressed my surprise about this, the nurses were unanimously & staunchly supportive of the need for thorough patient records - but they did concede that the sheer number of different records & the laborious, repetitive & frankly outdated way they have to do it, all take up far too much of their nursing time. Please - give them a break! Rationalise & reduce the paper records! Get some decent systems in place! Give them tablets - and not the pharmaceutical kind! Other than that, as I say, his care was generally excellent. I would only say (above all to doctors) - LISTEN to the patients & their carers more. Some doctors are - to put it kindly - a little peremptory in their attitude to family carers; their experience, knowledge & the invaluable recent medical history they can provide. Some doctors are just plain arrogant. As a result, my father endured 3 extra days of avoidable & severe pain, while the doctors allowed themselves to be sidetracked by his slight constipation - even though I told them REPEATEDLY, on admission, that 1. this had only started AFTER the onset of pain 2 days earlier, & 2. he was already under investigation for occasional urinary pain, by his own local Urology Team. Eventually they realised that laxatives were not the answer to the meaning of life, & at last returned to the urology problem that I had told them about in the first place. Given the facts I'd clearly presented to them on admission, it's hard to justify this mis-diagnosis: the extra pain it caused & the adverse impact on his mobility of 3 avoidable days in bed - another danger I had warned them about! Plus the fact that their excessive & prolonged use of laxatives then caused him to yo-yo between the 2 extremes - rather unsettling for a man who's always been as regular as clockwork! After initial admission, I never got to see the doctor responsible for his care - not even when discharged - & not even to explain the further treatment for which he is to return in a few weeks. All medical info arrived piecemeal via nurses & harassed but well-meaning junior doctors. I visited twice a day for several hours each time, but never saw a senior. If I had seen a senior, I would have put these concerns to them directly - & I would still like to do so. Apart from anything else - a lot of NHS money was wasted, in my opinion, on a 3-day constipation red herring - when the answer was staring them in the face! Another area in which NHS money was wasted, was the teeth-pulling experience that is medical discharge. My father was identified as fit for discharge late one afternoon, but it was agreed that, for his own comfort, he would stay until the next morning. But the next day, the process of doctors writing up discharge notes did not even START until mid-afternoon! Only once that was complete was the pharmacy request submitted - which then took over 2 more hours to come back! The pharmacy order consisted of yet MORE laxatives (no thanks!), unnecessary painkillers & other stuff he already has. If we MUST have them to get discharged, why can't I go & pick them up myself? All this time, he's occupying a bed that someone else might need. Despite being admitted via GP referral, Dad still had to endure a wait of over 6 HOURS for a bed - sitting in a cold waiting room in severe pain. By the time he got one, the cheerful 88-yr-old who had arrived was in pretty poor shape. He would hate to have been the cause of some other poor soul having to endure the same ordeal - just because he was awaiting meds he didn't need for & didn't use! So it was after 9pm by the time he got home - hardly ideal at his age and entirely avoidable. One other safety issue that concerned me (but entertained my father!) was the constant presence on the ward of multiple patients with dementia or other mental health problems. They required exclusive staff to keep them & everyone else safe, but even so there were several violent & unpleasant incidents for these non-mental-health-trained nurses to endure, including a stabbing with broken glass. Other hospitals we've attended elect to treat such patients in a different setting; I wonder what terrible thing must happen before Watford reconsiders its current policy? NB the identification options below specify carer OR family; I am both. This reminds me that one ward doctor tried to tell me my father should be cared for by Socisl Services, and not me - his own daughter. Assuming I didn't misunderstand his English - I find that suggestion offensive. Even if Dad were eligible for Social Services care (which he isn't), I find it worrying that a medic should be so inhuman as to think care from strangers is better than care by your own family - if you're lucky enough to have the choice, which so few people are.

Watford General Hospital 2016-11-15 Person 4 5 0

I had a really positive experience at watford A & E on monday 14th November 2016, I think the doctor I saw was Vanisha Madhav and I just wanted to say thank you to her for making the experience as positive as it could have been. She was friendly, approachable, informative, thorough and sensitive. Thanks again.