Whiston Hospital

Poor care, my mother says she would rather die than go to Whiston!!

The place is new and soulless, clean and tidy, but no care, staff talk between themselves, while you stand waiting to ask for help. They managed to lose my mothers belongings, broke her hearing aid, they could not understand how important a hearing aid is, thinking shouting at a deaf person is the only answer.
When you ask for info the Drs answer was I have not seen her, the nurse pulled out a scrap of paper from her pocket!! what happened to records?

To telephone you need a password, but you have to go in to get the password, the system is just not right.

Car parking a joke, no info on the web site, even parking attendants telling you to park on the grass, taxi ranks full of cars parked in the wrong place. Not enough disabled bays, so cars just dumped all over the area.

WH Smiths is so expensive just to buy water or sweets, at least Costa Coffee was ok.

All in all It was very disappointing, when the care is so bad for patients they say they will not press the care alarm again, it must be bad. Some nurses were lovely, but it was never the same staff each time you went so confusing and upsetting for elderly people.

Come on Whiston, do some fine tuning, make the patients feel cared for, and improve the food, terrible compared to Newton. Its not only medicine that gets people better.

After badly wrenching my shoulder out of joint and suffering at home for 2 days on a diet of xxx strong painkillers I reluctantly went to A&E with nothing but bad memories of the old place and being left to wait on several occassions for 6-8 hours on a trolley.


I was seen by triage within 5 minutes and given a temporary sling to ease the pain within 10 minutes.


Within less than 2 hours, I had been X-rayed, thoroughly checked over, prescribed horse strength painkillers, given a sling and was back home.


All the staff were efficient, quick and helpful. I just hope the place stays this way.


Only downside is severe lack of parking, there is a tiny carpark opposite A&E with space for about 12 cars, if that's full your stuffed and on the multi-storey on Warrington road.

I actually really want to give this place one star, but that's kinda tight, they did get me better after all.


As some (probably only one) of you know I've been a bit poorly of late, so much so a trip to the local hospital was in order.


Now ok, they got me on a drip and made me better, but that's about where the good part ends and the bad begins. I think I could probably write a book on my week in the NHS's care and how horrific it was although I really don't want to diss it as I do think the fundamentals of the NHS are good and lets face it they did fix me. But oh my goodness the understaffing, the hygiene standards, the on-call hours and it's repercussions, the food, the basic concept of pain relief and administration and by no means least trying to get out of the place especially after having been promised I could go for 2 days.


Where to begin and which story to tell,


There's the one where a used bed pan was left in the only patient toilet with a lock on it (to be fair there where only two toilets to begin with) for over 3 hours and when I finally complained about it, it was removed but no disinfectant or cleaning of any description was used where the bed pan had been, on the only usable surface in the room! Trying to brush my teeth that night was an adventure.


There's the one where having got up to use the loo at 7am, I got back to find my bed stripped. I was also in quite a lot of pain, and having notified the nurse on duty who promised both pain relief and sickness tablets (pain make's me sick). I was left to be sick and have a nose bleed (all of which was left on the table by me) while I was curled up on the chair writhing in pain pressing my 'nurse attention button' to be found a hour and a half later by the doctor. Who to his defence was utterly astounded and annoyed and got me sorted out, but still shouldn't have happened in the first place. And in her hurry the nurse injected me with something (I think to stop the sickness) which to this day has left a large lump on my leg (this is over a week later)


There's also the one where the on-call doctor doing 8pm to 8am shift (nice!) managed to get to me at 7.30am to put my drip back in after the last one had dried up (due to a change of wards and the nurses not having time to fix me up straight away, even with trying to flush it). It took the doctor 4 painful attempts to find a vein, the final one being in the most uncomfortable of positions (we both kinda knew it wasn't great but she didn't look much older than me and was totally shattered plus the pain of trying again made me agree to just leave it) By the end of the day the pain got so bad though that I could no longer move my arm or hand for fear of it breaking back up through my skin where it had created a nasty bruised lump.


And on and on and on....


I do think mainly that alot of what happened was due to staff shortages, the nurses where as good as they could be as far as I could tell, they just didn't have enough time in which to do everything and see to everyone they had to.

Whiston received mix reviews depending on the experience of the patients. Some wards are better than others however I have two family members who have had bad experiences there recently. One was left in hospital overnight when there was no need but whilst they were they were treated ok. The other person was eventually transferred to St Helens and the difference was immense. It took a week for their papers to make it a few miles down the road. The new car park is a multi storey and is the opposite side of the road but it gets very dark at night and it unsupervised so I didn't feel comfortable walking back and forth.

I was born here and had both my children here i have always recieved excellent treatment as both in and out patient. I refuse to be treated at any other hospital.