Oh yeah, I knew there was something I wanted/needed to backdate, and it runs thusly.

As you may or may not have guessed from the aggravated tones of some of my recent LJ posts, the ward I am (um... was, I finished the placement this evening, so yay! for a bit of free time) placed on was transferring over to a new building whilst I was still on placement on it. This was... a bit of a weird experience to say the least. Nine shifts to make up, I did seven of them in the Middlesex and two of them in University College Hospital. Because the Placement Gods hate me or something.

Anyway. Yeah. New hospital. Very new hospital actually. I've never worked in a modern hospital before, most of the buildings I have done my placements in being stately redbrick edifices from around the turn of the century (yeah, last century) which have been hastily modified as times changed and new areas of treatment began to spring up. This, needless to say, proved Not Exactly Ideal in a number of ways. Or at least I didn't think it was, but I am a shameless technofreak with a serious love of and longing for shiny things. Prettiful though old buildings are on the outside, they don't make very good hospitals.

Really, it was about time the Middlesex was wound down.

First impressions of the new hospital then? Well... more weird than overwhelmingly positive. The NHS being the NHS, they hadn't considered it worth their while orientating mere student nurses to their new surroundings, meaning that I spent much of yesterday standing around looking and feeling dazed. Today I actually started to take things in. Meaning I now have Opinions, and I intend to make them known.

The Good Stuff:

• The wards are less open. Smaller bays, more space, a lot more privacy for the patients. That's a good thing, by the way, even if it does mean the allocation sometimes gets a bit funny. Really, I don't think open wards do people any favors at all. This isn't perfect (perfect would be individual rooms for everyone) but it's a lot better than what they had before.


• Lifts. We travel further (there's sixteen floors rather than five) but we do it one Hell of a lot quicker. More to the point, riding in them isn't an Alton Towers experience which leaves the unwitting traveler's stomach several floors behind them and leaves them staggering out in a dizzy, stoned haze. Even better, the bed lifts can only be called and used by staff, which should see the end to those awkward situations in which a patient attached to God-Knows how many drips and drains shares a lift with two small boys eating Pickled Onion Monster Munch and a woman with a Harvey Nicks bag.


• Everything's shiny. I know, shallow, but I like the shininess of the place. It amuses me. Joking apart, the old hospitals I've worked in all seemed very gloomy. I like the fact that this one's all bright and white and light and has nice big windows. I just think the place as a Coolness Factor the old buildings lacked. This place actually looks like a hospital, and I love it for that.


• The view. Well worth the price of admission in and of itself. No fun for vertigo sufferers, but the view from even halfway up the tower is superb. I made an excuse to run an errand to the 16th floor on Tuesday, and to say that London looks pretty nice from up there is to understate the point considerably. I adore cityscapes, and I cannot wait to see what it looks like by night.


• Lockers in the staff room. And they're pay lockers as well. All this time student nursing and I have never gotten a goddamned locker to put my bag in. I'm just a touch grateful for the opportunity to keep my purse and mp3 player behind lock and key while I'm on the wards. I hate having to rely on the kindness of staff members to keep my precious things safe.


• The X-ray suite is no longer in a bunch of 1920s' administrators' offices and-stroke-or intimidatingly fancy consulting rooms which were hastily converted into said X-ray suite when someone realized the Middlesex Hospital needed rather more X-rays and rather less book-lined studies. Needless to say this conversion job didn't exactly work particularly well, one-time offices not proving terribly good at housing the huge white vastness that is modern radiographic equipment. Nor do they make terribly good reporting rooms.
  
• A better class of hospital smell.

The... Um... Not-So-Good Stuff:

• Door cards. To get anywhere in this place you the inhabitant need an electronic door pass. Of course nobody's thought about giving the ward spares so that students can actually get about the place, meaning that we more kind of can't.


• The break room's far too small for the number of staff who'll need to use it. It's tiny, no kidding. The place didn't seem that cramped when I was on duty, but the ward was only half full at that point. I hate to think what it's going to be like when everything's up to full staffing. Will they bring in more chairs, or will some of us have to sit on the floor during handover?


• The card things patients need to pay for to use the TVs by their beds cost an absolute fortune. At least people can choose what programs they want to watch and those who hate the soaps won't get them rammed down their throats any more - but their wallets will be brutally raped for the privilege.


• There's no garden. This I think speaks for itself.

Teething problems, of course, abound. Nobody knows their way round the place, running errands takesd ages, some of the departments are definitely not quite ready for habitation yet. Even a small amount of usage is enough to expose the, uh, flaws in construction in places - there's not enough storage space and I went to get a cup of water for a patient and the head of the tap literally came off in my hand. How terribly Depression-era comedy of me. But give it six months for people to get the hang of the place and I think we'll do okay.