"Care at the hospital emergency department"

I’m writing to praise the staff we interacted with and who treated my daughter at Rockingham hospital recently. My daughter has had a handful of ED visits over the last four years, for mental distress, suicidality and self harm. Consistently over these years I have seen and experienced improved care and compassion in ED staff. From triage through to discharge after assessment and wound care, I feel staff have shown increasingly levels of understanding, acceptance instead of stigma, decreased judgement and increased compassionate care.

The triage nurse we saw at our recent visit was calm and non judgemental. She came out to check my daughter’s wounds, didn’t speak or show judgment, and called into the ED ward who found a trolley for us to go straight through. I noticed the nurses on the ward were equally calm, non-judgmental and compassionate.

I felt the registry doctor was excellent. No judgement, no holding involuntary admission over her head, no dismissing her words when she explained that she was safe, not at suicide risk, and no stigma and judgement. He didn’t even do the, I feel, usual look at me as if he didn’t trust her answers.

He acknowledged that change is hard, lapses happen, and let she and I both know he was happy to talk more if we wanted. He passed the wound care to his nurse practitioner who I felt was also calm, compassionate and non-judgmental.

The whole time we spent there felt like her care was delivered just as well as it would have been had her wounds happened in an accident or any other way. That is vastly different than our experiences in 2020 and 2021, when I recall staff often left my daughter in the waiting room without even coming to check the severity of her wounds.