When I had a gynae op about three years ago now in the day surgery and it was on Christmas Eve, I had a brilliant experience, staff were absolutely wonderful, the theatre staff were brilliant, I couldn't fault it at all, I was very lucky, but don't think I will be this time.

Thank you all for your replies.

I did find quite a marked difference between being a day patient and an in patient though. On the day surgery ward there were lots of nurses and always someone available but as an in patient nurses were very scarce, I rarely saw one at all and waited hours to have my drip changed after the doctor authorised it. In fact he came back and did it himself in the end. Buzzers went unanswered until the entire ward was woken up too. Some things just amazed me, like being woken at midnight to be weighed in a wheelchair contraption Gawd knows why it was so important to weigh me that they had to wake me up to do it. For three days I couldn't even sit up in bed so they made me get up and sit in a chair, I felt so ill I made Iain help me back into bed.

Good for you. If you don't complain they don't know.

You must try not to worry, if you had a good experience back then, nothing is to say the standards have slipped in that hospital. Apparently the hospital I was in has always been 'minging'!!

My mum is a very senior oncologist who works in an NHS hospital and has a private practice. I'd rather stay in the NHS one!

It's absolutely spotless, though perhaps to be expected with chemo patients staying there.

In my own experience, I went to the same hosp to get some skin on my face cauterised last summer, and i can't fault them, they even made sure i got the same doctor who dealt with my ezema when i was a toddler, even though he hardly did any non-major/not serious skin work anymore! Nurses were lovely, never had to wait longer than ten mins, really looked after me.

I think there are probably more cut backs now to what there was then but thanks, I'll try and keep an open mind.

That's nice to know.

QMC Nottingham's not much better - THREE DAYS with no loo roll in one of the toilets, despite me reporting it endlessly, and some skanky git had put paper towels (the thought of using THEM to wipe with stitches is somewhat eyewatering - by this point hubby had brought me in Andrex and I was seen heading off up the corridor muttering "my preciousssss" in a way last seen on Lord of the Rings) down the loos and blocked them all... bloodied maternity pads left in the shower for days on end and ones left looking like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had moved in.

Add in a couple of really unpleasant experiences with some staff who were about as seriously in the wrong job as it's possible to get - including forcing me to do nasal gastric tubefeeds that I'd said I was really uncomfortable doing, and the cow whom, when I'd checked the tube for a feed one morning and wasn't confident it was still in correctly, ignored the buzzer for 30 minutes solid while she sat there reading Heat magazine (I could see her doing it), then strolled in, said she wasn't going to help me - deal with it... couldn't feed the baby till the tube was in correctly either - that one ended up with another trip down to NICU to get someone with a molecule of compassion (and competence) to fit a new feeding tube.

I'm actually having to have counselling to get over the things that we went through in that hellhole - and have spent most of the day sobbing at the thought we might have to go back to the hospital again if the little one's hernia doesn't resolve itself - hubby's put his foot down and said we'd beg and plead to go anywhere else in the country if that happened.

Lost a very dear family friend (more of a father to me than just a family friends) to a hospital infection last year too.

Suffice to say I'm now developing a rather splendid hospital phobia after it all.

Oh and I forgot to add the three and a half hours spent begging for pain relief I had - leading to me having to do the entire labour on two chuffing paracetamol. No one was bothered by the pain I was in.

I had major surgery in a NHS hosp last Augut and my treatment was brilliant, I couldnt fault anything at all. Also had day surgery at the same hosp in Feb and no problems there either even had tea and biscuits brought to me on a tray

Got to say when I was admitted as an emergency a few weeks back to Canterbury, the waiting time was a few hours, once it hit half 9 at night things were very speedy- especially for a Friday night too.

I stayed in over the weekend as I needed an operation, nurses and docs were great. I was one of only 3 female patients on the gynaecology ward (was the last one by the time saturday afternoon came). Toilets and showers were clean, and the meals were edible by hospital standards.