"Salmonella poisoning"

Attended PCH ED with my infant with frequent diarrhoea, very chesty cough, very pale and fevers 40°+. Subsequent to the constant diarrhoea, my child had the worst nappy rash. We got brought into the waiting room and was assessed by the nurse, who said they would be back to do a blood sugar. The nurse never came back. Another nurse then brought us into the rooms where we waited to see a doctor. I asked them did my child need to do a blood sugar as the previous nurse had said they were going to do one and hadn't. The nurse said they didn't know and would check with the doctor. I also asked them to check my child’s temperature as they were feeling hot, to which my child did have a fever.

Meanwhile while waiting for the doctor to review our child, I recall there were a few nurses at the nurse’s station chatting so loud about their weekend plans and in my opinion being very unprofessional. It was early in the morning and even with the door closed on our room we could still hear every word being said. The nurse didnt come back to inform us about the blood sugar either, it just wasn't done in the end. The doctor then reviewed us and sent us home with 'Bronchiolitis' with the diarrhoea being secondary to this.

We returned the next day as our child was not improving and was then having blood in their stools. We kept all of our child’s nappies for the doctors to see the blood. When we got reviewed by the doctor they didn't look at any of the nappies and sent us home with 'viral infection'. The doctor told us to go to GP with a stool sample if it continued and we were still worried.

The next day I called my GP for an appt first thing in the morning as was so worried about our child. They had no appts but did have a video call appt available that evening so we took that. Post video review we were asked to present the next day for physical review. The GP took a stool sample and prescribed our child with 3 days of steroids which they significantly improved on. The stool sample then came back showing Salmonella poisoning but by that stage luckily our child was much much better.

I am disappointed that PCH did not seem to do enough for my child, I felt they were very quick to call everything 'viral' without investigating or ruling anything else out prior.