Woodland Hospital 2015-11-19 Person 1 5 0

Booked in via NHS for a day case procedure that should have taken no more than 90mins. We were at the hospital for 5 hours and received no coherent or credible answers from either the nursing or reception staff as to what was the cause of the delay. The different responses we were given only reinforced our suspicions that we were being misled. A more serious issue is that the pre-pack information clearly stated that patients would be given a light sedative for the procedure but at the point of having the procedure we were told that ''no sedative would be given and we stopped doing that ages ago''. The patient, who was in a stressed and tearful state at that stage, then heard a patient leaving the sigmoidoscopy room saying ‘’no-one told me it would be that painful’’, then the nurse assisting the procedure said to here 'I'll just clean this as you won't want a dirty one used on you!" This procedure is known to cause discomfort and in some patients pain, the staff should make it explicit that there is no sedative offered so that patients may make an informed choice as to whether Woodlands an appropriate service for them. The staff attitudes (nurses and reception) bordered on indifferent, in particular the 3 nurses at the 1st floor desk none of whom showed any compassion for a clearly distressed patient or gave any apology for the long wait. Woodlands management should consider investing in quality training to ensure a high level patient experience is given and patients should expect no less. Alongside this the NHS commissioners responsible for handing the tender out to Woodlands should put in place onsite and accessible patient satisfaction feedback mechanisms.