La Timone was the worst hospital I have ever had the displeasure of going too. My boyfriend was…read morerecently in a ski accident which led to him having broken ribs, a partly fractured spinal cord and internal bleeding of the liver. We are both English and do not speak French, so firstly there was a communication problem. This led to the doctors/nurses failing to tell us important information. For example, there were several occasions where he would go for a scan and they would not tell us what for, or the results of the exam. We were originally in Briancon when the accident occured where he was transferred from Briancon hospital to La Timone. After spending almost a week in intensive care, we were told by the nurses that we would be transferred back to Briancon hospital by ambulance the following morning. We were told we would leave at 7am. It got to about 9am before a nurse came in to inform us that we were not covered to go in the ambulance even though the hospital were in contact with our insurance and were told by our insurance that we were covered. After speaking to the insurance company regarding the hospitals mistake, a doctor came to us and said that we were not going to Briancon and she did not know why we were told that. She then began to tell us that my boyfriend may need surgery on his partly fractured spinal cord. He had a scan and they confirmed that he needed it. This was all after we were supposedly being transferred to a different hospital that same day, not only was the communication bad between the hospital and us but it was even worse between the staff themselves. The following day a nurse came in and put a tag around my boyfriends wrist so the surgeons would know who he was, the tag was for a 50 something year old man so she had put the wrong tag on. The surgeons came in to take my boyfriend away for his surgery and we informed them of the nurses mistake, they did not care and simply took the tag off and did not replace it, which is highly unprofessional and extremely dangerous on the surgery side of things. They also did not inform us of what they were going to do with his surgery, all we knew is that it was keyhole. The day after his surgery he was moved into a normal ward. The ward itself was disgusting, the public toilets had no toilet paper, broken locks and big holes in the doors. Again, there was a communication problem as barely any of the nurses spoke english. Just like in intensive care each patient is given a button to press in case they needed anything. My boyfriend's first night in the normal ward proved how awful the system was. Having just had surgery he was in a lot of pain, therefore he asked for some pain killers as he wasn't given any, the doctor said he would get him some but never came back with any. So he then pressed his button to call for a nurse. The nurse took 30/40 minutes to attend to my boyfriend even though his room was right next to the nurses office who we could hear they were in there. The following day my boyfriend was seen by a physio therapist to help him to start to walk again, the physio told us that he would be back everyday to do a little bit more walking and even some stairs. We never saw this physio therapist again, myself and my boyfriends dad had to help him walk as this physio never returned. Not only did the physio therapist never come back but there was a severe lack of doctors. After being in this ward for an extra week we found that the doctors only come round at 7:30am and 9pm which is completely out of visitor hours which is 12pm-8pm. This meant that me and my boyfriends dad stayed there all day waiting around for a doctor to ask questions that the nurses could not answer. After spending a couple more days in the ward, my boyfriend gained mosquito bites from the bugs inside the hospital, even though you were not allowed to open the windows incase of infection on other patients , there were mosquitoes inside the hospital. When it came to us returning home to the uk, the doctor that was dealing with our case was truly awful. She had to communicate with both us and the insurance to ensure that all the right paperwork and documents were correct in order for my boyfriend to be dispatched. Because there was a severe lack of doctors, we had to wait until 9pm every night for this doctor just to find out that she had not done what she was meant to. This doctor told us he would be dispatched on what was then Thursday, but due to her being bad at her job the papers weren't actually ready until Saturday and she did not seem to care at all. When the day finally came for my boyfriend to be dispatched, we asked for all the medication he had been having so it could last him until we got back to England. A nurse bought in a big plastic bag of all his medication but made no effort to explain what he should be taking and how much as she could not speak English and made no effort to find someone that could. A truly awful hospital.
