Dom Marie

Review of London Health Sciences Centre

Terrible experience here. My 12 year old brother c...

Terrible experience here. My 12 year old brother came in because he had a tumour in his stomach and was flown from Sudbury to London for the child inpatient section. He was diagnosed with type 3 B-Cell lymphoma, Dr.Gibson was an amazing doctor and was super patient with my little brother and his parents who had tons of questions. He walked us through everything and made sure we clearly understood what was going on. He was a pleasant guy, but I can't say the same for the nurses. My brother (who had cancer) complained about nurses being rude to him like Kim telling him he should wear clothes (mind you, this cancer makes him warm and he gets overheated, but also it's not her place to say anything). He had several nurses telling him to do different things, so they were all contradicting one another, confusing the kid. Now, we had a huge issue with the nurses that needs to be addressed; the EXCLAMATION MARK. The exclamation mark is a paper hung on patients doors if they are deemed a threat or dangerous to nurses AND they refuse to wear a purple armband. One night, my little brother was in the bathroom when a nurse tried walking in on him because his monitor was beeping (a med had just run out). Our dad felt the need to interveen because the nurse wasn't understanding that my little brother was actually using the bathroom and needed a minute before anyone could go in, or he could come out. The nurse was very upset with our dad standing in her way on the door, not letting her go into the bathroom. My dad told the nurse if my little brother was okay with it, my dad could go in, or my brother could push out the pole so the nurse could get to it without her going into the bathroom and violating his privacy, or she could wait a moment for him to come out. She said that those options weren't okay and that she's worked as a nurse for over 30 years and knew what she was doing. To which our dad told her she would have to get through him first. She took that way too hard because the next day, there appeard an exclamation mark. We looked up what this meant and found out it's to LABEL patients for being aggressive or a threat to nurses. Mind you, my 12 year old brother with cancer did nothing wrong. He simply didn't want a nurse going into the bathroom while his pants were down. That's not too much to ask. No matter how old he is. Furthermore, I would like to point out if the genders were reversed, meaning it was a male nurse trying to walk in on a teenage girl in the bathroom, hell would have been let loose. We tried taking down the exclamation mark because it was absurd, but we were threatened to be removed from the hospital. It got to the point that they were sending it two nurses in at a time for their safety. The nurses demeanour changed so quick, they came off as nervous and uneasy, almost scared to be in our room. We had to arrange a meeting with the director or the children's hospital section because our dad was given a letter stating that if the exclamation mark was removed again, security could be called and he could be removed an no longer welcome to the hospital, she said the only thing we could do is appeal the exclamation mark (which could take months, we didn't have months). As it turns out , we knew more about the exclamation mark than she did. Unbelievable, nothing came of that meeting other than we got to meet a really cool and helpful patient relations girl who helped us get rid of it, because as it turns out, the exclamation mark is ONLY supposed to be for the patient (though they issued it for our dad), and it was only supposed to be put up for the visit of said incident, but we had been in and out of the hospital due to complications with my brothers cancer, and that exclamation mark popped up every time we were signed in again. The nurses humiliated my brother and made his stay awful. He was embarrassed and anyone (including visitors!) Were very skeptical about going into his room. All because a nurse didn't like what our dad had to say about her walking into the bathroom. I won't be surprised if they get a lawsuit.