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What patients say about Treatment Centres

  • Last modified date:
    8 February 2007
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Patients' experiences of Treatment Centres.

When Joan Blofield banged her leg in July last year she ended up with a serious and very painful venous and rheumatoid ulcer.

After several visits to the nurse at her local surgery and a consultation with her GP, Joan was referred to Chase Hospital's new NHS Treatment Centre (TC) at Bordon, just 10 miles down the road from her village.

The alternative was a 50-mile round trip to an outpatients ward in Basingstoke and waiting about two months longer to see a specialist. As it was she was seen within a week of her referral.

"Now, after four months, the wound is only the size of the tip of your little fingernail," she said. "So I'm really pleased to be on the mend. The pain was horrendous."

She expects to go in for two more treatments and feels she has had specialist treatment as she was seen by specially trained nurses.

"You've got experts dealing with you and you get their full attention," she said. "I don't say this sort of thing lightly but you cannot fault them and the service they provide. "

Joan Wilsdon's two cataract operations have been so successful that she can now see better than she can remember.

Joan, aged 80, from Hornchurch, was treated at Moorfields Eye Hospital's St Ann's Treatment Centre (TC) in Tottenham six months after her GP diagnosed cataracts in April 2002. She was told she would have had to wait more than a year if she had stayed on the local hospital waiting list.

Instead, due to the extra capacity provided by the new service, once Joan was sent to the TC in mid-October, she had the five appointments she needed for surgery and follow-ups on both eyes booked then and there, and all at times to suit her.

She is very pleased with the outcome as well as with the treatment she received.

"They were all very friendly and very competent," she said. "Even the nurses knew how to look at the back of my eye - they were specialists themselves. I cannot fault the treatment I received."

"The whole hospital was brilliant. The physiotherapists and occupational therapists were fantastic."

At the age of 51, Kay Whiteside is younger than most people who need hip replacements, but she says her year-long wait gave her a real insight into the illness suffered by so many older people.

"It was so depressing," she said. "I had to give up my job. I also used to enjoy line dancing, but that was impossible. I was well on the way to becoming housebound. In the last week before my operation I got as far as the local shops, and that was a real struggle."

In fact, if Kay had not been offered a place at Ravenscourt Park TC in west London, she would have had up to a15-month wait until July 2003. However, because she had already waited more than six months, the London Patient Choice Programme contacted her to offer her treatment at Ravenscourt Park.

"I don't want to think about how I would have felt by then. I'm just grateful I was transferred," she said.

Kay attended her pre-assessment appointment on 29 October 2002, and had her operation exactly a month later:

"The whole hospital was brilliant. The physiotherapists and occupational therapists were fantastic - they even showed me how to put my trousers on by myself.

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