Would you recommend your hospital experience to your family?

Posted 27/05/2012

It was announced last week that one of the recommendations of the Nursing Care Quality Forum was to be adopted. Those who have received treatment in hospital are going to be asked whether, based on the care they have received, they would recommend the hospital to family and friends and the results of this review will then be made public.Trefine Maynard, a solicitor with the medical Negligence team at Ashtons Legal said: “Whilst I welcome a commitment to review the patient experience and to make this review public, there is no commitment or suggestion of how any problems that come to light will be addressed. A recommendation that minimum levels of nurses should be introduced has not been adopted. Many of our clients and our own experiences of family and friends in hospital have highlighted the lack of staff on wards. Very often the care actually given by nurses when they attend is highly praised but there are nowhere near enough staff on the wards so that patients are left unattended for hours. When clinical staff are with patients, they are all too frequently unable to give the patient enough time to deal with their worries or to inform them fully. We see many cases where mistakes are made seemingly because of the huge pressures put on staff both in terms of time and number of patients under their care. It would be wonderful to see a positive commitment to ensuring that enough nurses and doctors are on duty at hospital to ensure a proper level of care”.