A former councillor has praised doctors and nurses for the first-class care that she received during a recent stay at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, in Brighton.
Dawn Barnett, 85, served as a councillor for almost 20 years from 2004 to 2023. She said: “So many people say the hospital is terrible. I’m fed up with people running the hospital down.
“I know that corridor care is necessary – I was in the corridor for hours – but the care that I was given was the best you could get anywhere.
“It wasn’t chaotic. The staff were organised. They were bringing food and drink round and the service was first class. The staff were superb. They were fantastic.
“There was no shouting or arguing. It’s unfortunate they need to use the corridor. It’s very busy. I was in the corridor all day and half the night.”
Mrs Barnett, a retired carer, said that she was admitted with a fever, having felt giddy and then having collapsed at her home in Hangleton.
She also praised the care that she received from the ambulance paramedics who attended her in the first instance before she was taken to the A&E (Accident and Emergency) Department at the Royal Sussex.
But, she said, Hove used to have its own hospital, in Sackville Road, and added that it would be better if it had been replaced, as promised before it closed, with a new one.
The Royal Sussex had to serve a huge population, she said, adding: “They can build and build but they need to put enough staff in place.”
She said that Portsmouth and Southampton both had a smaller population than Brighton and Hove but had more hospitals.
Despite her criticism of the system, she said that she could not fault those who treated her and put her on the road to recovery.
She said: “They were marvellous – each and every one of them.”
Go on Dawn
Love this Lady-still wearing her Heels.
Hiya dawn sorry to here you have been unwell but its first class news to hear your on the mend,you served the people as nobody else has done and you deserved to be recognised for it you helped me out a couple of times and I am still grateful, God bless and all the best to you for the future
Corridor care is NOT necessary. It never used to happen. Royal Sussex serves a biggish population not huge. Huge is London, Manchester etc where they know what they’re doing.
The staff are great – spending a lot of time as carers as it takes so long for rest results and XRays to come back. It’s the management who are incompetent and fail to give Brighton the medical care it needs
they used have a a/e at shoreham but closed the population is growing so we need a new hospital in shoreham .sorry you had to spend hr in brighton coridore but as you said the service and care was top notch .so we have great nurses and doctors just need more hospitals
I have been to this hospital 3 times lately. Staff were absolutely phenomenal. I can’t praise this place enough.
Agree that staff do their best but corridor care and the very long waits are unacceptable. When the new hospital was built this situation was already bad so why was nothing done then. Something like 24 hour polyclinics at other hospitals could be set up and with effective triage very serious illnesses could be directed to major AE departments. Or ambulance paramedics could be asked to assess the level of risk. They are very well trained and senior paramedics could do this. It’s a shocking situation in a wealthy country like Britain and we should not accept it is acceptable.
Whatever happened to the £350 million a week that would be pumped into the NHS that Farage and Johnson promised us when we left Europe?
That number was creative at best and later exposed as nonsense.
Currently the national debt is increasing by that number every day, let alone week.
Massive Reception area. Tiny A&E. How was that allowed to happen in a supposedly superior design to the old hospital?
If more people complained about the shocking stare of a&e maybe it would be improved. Spending millions on improving the hospital but not improving the part that sees the most number of people, and hasn’t been enlarged to account for a larger population is ridiculous. A&E is still the size from when Brighton was a town of 100,000 people.
Is this some sort of Stockholm syndrome?
We warned that Brexit would mean a loss in care staff. That loss means care and discharge packages are delayed and beds are blocked, we were ignored