"Very impressed with majority of nursing staff at Maroondah Hospital"

Dear Recent patient

Thank you very much for sharing your experience and your story on Patient Opinion - it's great to receive feedback which allows us to identify where we do things well and importantly, where we need to improve. Thank you also for your favourable assessment of public healthcare and recognition of the great work being done at Maroondah Hospital. I will pass on your feedback to our staff and their managers and thanks for taking the extra time to name the specific staff - they will no doubt be very delighted too!

However, I was sorry to read about your experience in the Outpatient Department and I really do understand how frustrating it is to wait for long periods of time for an appointment. I am further disappointed to know that one of our staff made the comment about the "public system" to you and I agree that this is not a good advertisement at all. I will be following this up with the Outpatient Manager at Maroondah Hospital. Whilst it doesn't help you right now, I can also report that we have a major improvement project taking place across all of Eastern Health's Outpatient Departments and ultimately, this will include self check-in, individual times for appointments and a much more modern approach in the Outpatient Clinics. We have already made improvements and also made changes recently (also based on Patient Opinion feedback) with regard to changing our "on hold" messages to encourage patients to email rather than "hold" where that was possible.

So, slowly but surely, we will get there and I am sorry that you had a less than ideal experience this time round.

Thank you again for writing and sharing your feedback.

Kind regards, Alan Lilly