Stobhill Hospital

[tanngrisnir]

Stobhill continues to puzzle me. Most hospitals give some thought to provision of facilities for relatives and visitors, but from the design of Stobhill you would think it was extremely unusual for there to be visitors:

• In the whole of the main part of the hospital, there are only two small toilets provided for visitors, one in the middle of the surgical corridor, the other in the middle of the medical corridor (there is also a toilet in Casualty - but you can’t get to the waiting room there without going outside);
• there is a (fairly uncomfortable) WRVS café, which is quite a distance from either of those toilets and has no toilet provision of its own (this is a hospital of long corridors);
• disabled toilet provision is even worse: there is a disabled toilet in that Casualty waiting room, but you have to go outside (and I would not like to leave via the main entrance in a wheel chair - there is a very short, quite steep ramp to pavement level; come to that, the road and pavement surfaces in the hospital are very poor); there are two other disabled toilets, but it was not at all clear from the notice giving that information where exactly they are or how to get there;
• it would be pretty awful being a wheelchair-bound visitor: there are lifts on the surgical corridor to the upper level, at each end of the (long) corridor, but as far as I can see, the main provision of lifts on the medical corridor are old lifts at each ward, which have long, heavy, manually operated double doors - actually, I think that quite a few elderly people would struggle with them, too;
• at least some of the wards have no waiting area for visitors, so that before the ward opens to visitors there is a crush of people waiting in corridors and on staircases because there is literally nowhere else for them to wait;
• despite that, there is a fairly rigid “two visitors only per bed” policy, which means that some people have to stand around outside the ward - no, there are no seats for them;
• I had thought that most hospitals were recognising that there needed to be a bit of flexibility with visiting hours, given that people do things like work, but visiting hours here are a rigid one hour in the afternoon (14:30-15:30) and one hour at night (19:00-20:00);
• given the poor transport provision to the place, you would think there would be some information provided about transport - but, no: the most there is seems to be a set of bus and train timetables (why train? - the nearest station is not exactly within walking distance); that’s be something, I suppose, except that you really need to know exactly where you are to make sense of them (if you go to a hospital in a part of town you don’t know, how likely are you to know all the street names nearby?), and that isn’t helped by the provision of timetables for buses that don’t seem to come all that close to the hospital.

It is striking (but probably shouldn’t be surprising) that many visitors are themselves either elderly and frail or not in the best of health. Stobhill may be a good hospital when it comes to the quality of its medical and surgical care, but its treatment of visitors is a disgrace. It is clear that no one in charge of the place has a weak bladder or the slightest problem with their legs.

I gather, too, that the quality of the food leaves something to be desired. According to my mother, everything is a bit watery, and items ordered don’t necessarily arrive. As for what does arrive, well, you would think that a steak pie would come with at least some pastry.

Wouldn’t you?