TODAY the Queen officially opened Glasgow's new "super-hospital".
My son and I were able to see her visit from our position in a room on the second floor where children are treated for blood cancers amongst other things.
What we weren't able to do is tell her that in many important ways the new hospital is providing a much worse service to poorly children.
Despite the excellent staff, nurses, doctors, cleaners, dieticians, physiotherapists (the list goes on), since the move from Yorkhill my son has received a much worse quality of service as an inpatient and a daycare patient.
In particular the food is significantly worse than at the old Yorkhill hospital, due to the lack of proper on-site cooking facilities. It amazes me that the food has taken such a turn for the worse particularly on a ward where children are receiving chemotherapy, which can have a huge impact on the food a child can tolerate, and where eating becomes an important factor in assessing whether children are well enough to get home.
How many times do there need to be news stories about substandard hospital food before something is done? It is doubly frustrating that having experienced really good food at Yorkhill, we know that the NHS is (or at least was) capable of doing so much better.
In other important areas the service is worse too. It now takes much longer to get various test results, medicines from the pharmacy and to get blood products sent up to children who need them. My son had a blood cancer, and as you can imagine getting blood transfusions promptly is pretty important. All of this would appear to be because services are now shared across the adult and children's hospital, whereas before Yorkhill had its own dedicated services.
There are other issues too that relate to the quality of life of an inpatient, such as a much smaller playroom on the ward, no sensory room (there was a great sensory room in the Schiehallion ward at Yorkhill) and wifi access that fails to work much of the time. Wifi may seem like a petty issue, but it is frustrating that children visiting the new hospital for an hour or two will have an array of shiny new toys to play with in the atrium, while children who are confined to a room in strict isolation for weeks, sometimes months, have a lost an important way to communicate with friends and family in the outside world.
It seems to me that at the very least, those responsible for the move from Yorkhill to the new hospital should have made absolutely sure that existing levels of service were maintained, or perhaps even improved. It is a shame that so much has been made worse.
Of course, the shiny and colourful bits of the hospital that the saw will looked very impressive, but that is of no consolation to me or my son.
Merlin Kemp,
94 Lochend Road, Edinburgh.
I HAVE just visited my 10-year-old grandson in the Schiehallion (paediatric oncology) unit of Glasgow's new hospital.
He is in his 19th month of treatment for acute myeloid leukaemia and the consequences of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and a stem cell transplant.
His care at Yorkhill when he underwent transplant in December was exemplary. But although the lovely Schiehallion staff have moved to the new campus, many other features of Yorkhill have not moved, including its excellent kitchen. In Edinburgh Sick Kids Hospital, where he had previously been an in-patient, the food, cooked off-premises, was frankly grim : in Yorkhill, meals were hot, well presented and nutritious.
Children receiving long-term treatment for life-threatening diseases deserve, and need, decent, healthy food.
It is distressing, therefore, that the food in our new hospital is not prepared on site: it's cold, unhealthy and unappetising.
While the hospital may offer an improvement on some of the tired facilities of Yorkhill, a glitzy external appearance doesn't compensate for such a basic lack.
Incidentally, I wonder if the Queen shared the children's cancer ward's promised "celebratory meal":hot dogs , or chicken nuggets?
Ailsa Ferguson,
120 Hutton, Glasgow.
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