"Emergency admission"

We visited with concerns for toddler respiratory condition. Communication deteriorated from when we were moved into children's emergency section. It took over 30 mins (?) for a nurse to come by to check they had taken a swab (they hadn't). No staff member communicated the next steps or wait time. I felt increasingly stressed as I was trying to manage a very tired toddler in a brightly lit space, with no idea of time frames. Health wise, they has started to look a lot better since we had arrived at the hospital so we were conscious our wait times were going to be long, but decided to stay as they had been very up and down. While i was waiting there, I overheard the staff talking judgmentally about a client's family (who had admitted themself). I feel it was quite possible that the client could have been overhearing too. I believe they also were left waiting without much communication. This was also upsetting as they appeared to be quite vulnerable.

We can't recall the staff checking my toddler’s ears or throat while we were there, just their temperature and a swab. We were discharged around 5 hours later, the doctor didn't provide much explanation of the symptoms to assist home management. My spouse received the first part of the swab results by text (nothing positive).

A week later (where we still continued to manage our very upset toddler) we visited the GP and they found the second half of the swab results which showed a positive result. If we hadn't asked the GP to check their records, we would not have found out these results as they were never communicated by the hospital. The GP also checked our toddler’s ears and mouth and explained that they had an extremely red and sore throat and congested ears, so was likely in pain while eating (hence off food and drinking less) and in pain while sleeping due to ears. This was the level of care that we felt was missing at the hospital.

My final grievance it that the hospital is seemingly not well set up to receive consumer feedback and in fact seems to discourage it with its processes. Written feedback can only be sent to the hospital via identifiable email or through a phone call. I have sent a similar response to this story via email, but am concerned that someone could link my name to the review despite me requesting for the feedback to be identified. We luckily were not navigating anything too distressing in terms of medical concerns, but it worries me that others with greater health worries are receiving a quite poor level of care.