Below are what some parents told us of their experiences with this hospital. For every review below we have the name of the patient, the name of the parent and their contact details – email and phone number – if the honesty of below reviews is ever challenged in court. Every parent posting here is confident they have extensive evidence to back up all their claims on this page.
You can add your experience to the below by getting in touch with us.
Review 1: From Parent of Daughter in Shepherd Ward:
Rhodes Wood Hospital has been rated inadequate by CQC and rightly so. From the outset our experience with Rhodes Wood was negative. We felt that with an inadequate CQC inspection Elysium Healthcare would be all over it and focusing heavily on bringing the hospital up to standard and so decided to take the bed offered. Unfortunately this was not the case despite having a call from the therapy team Lead assuring me RWH was at the forefront of research and training for eating disorders. Whilst there are some kind, compassionate, competent staff members (and a good school), there are not nearly enough and many of the hospital’s failings are systemic – with management seemingly unaware of the issues going on inside the hospital.
Many staff are agency or bank without the relevant training or experience – particularly on the weekends. Care plans are inconsistently followed and shift handovers were chaotic, inadequate and lacking in detail resulting in alarming and distressing inconsistency for the patients. Medication was handed out at the wrong time and sometimes the wrong dosages to my daughter.
It wasn’t until we got solicitors involved as my daughter’s mental health was seriously deteriorating at the Unit, resulting in damaging self harm and head banging, that a care plan was put in place for my daughter weeks after her admission. Her Father died unexpectedly just after Christmas and no one or any protocol was put in place to support her, pretty brutal as I wasn’t even allowed to visit her due to Covid restrictions.
There was no consistent therapeutic treatment due to the lack of therapists and I had to fight to finally get this in place. No one could tell me what the overall treatment plan was for my daughter, meal support was inadequate, some staff didn’t seem to know what they were supposed to do to support at meal times and often left the patients sitting alone at the tables. Some NG feeds were undertaken with under trained support staff, leaving my already vulnerable daughter extremely frightened and stressed.
Following two formal complaints – one which wasn’t acknowledged by the management team for a whole week and only got a response when I followed it up – I managed to get her out, with great courage and fortitude from my daughter who is now having to have trauma therapy due to her dreadful experience at RWH. Having experienced excellent care at another unit in Birmingham (not run by Elysium Healthcare) I am shocked that our vulnerable children are still being treated like this in this day and age. // end
Review 2: From Parent of Patient in <ward Name not disclosed>
When my daughter was admitted nobody told us how things worked. It was an alien world to us with a lot of abbreviations and acronymns. But the staff seemed friendly and helpful.
Unfortunately, that didn’t last long. Most of the staff are untrained with mental health and have often made the most awful comments to my daughter because of their total lack of understanding of eating disorders. Even the regular staff who should know better have often been rude and condescending.
That was just the start. It got a lot, lot worse. Management are totally useless. Communication is worse than useless. Theft is rife with my daughter’s expensive items often getting stolen.
The longer my daughter stayed in this awful place the worse she got. My sincere advice to anyone who has an option of going elsewhere DO NOT SEND YOUR CHILD TO RHODES WOOD HOSPITAL. He or she is better off not having any treatment at all rather than going to this sham of a hospital.
Review 3: From Father of Patient in Shepherd Ward
My daughter has been there for almost a year and a half. This hospital gets a ton of money from the NHS – really, really obscene amounts of money but the poor level of care in Rhodes Wood Hospital cannot be adequately described in words!
I’ll give you a few examples of what we experienced:
- Night staff who didn’t know how to read a medicine chart gave my daughter an overdose of sleeping pills.
- Staff who were meant to be watching her on 1:1 in the isolation room when she was suicidal often took that opportunity to have a nap (we have photographic evidence!). One even asked her, “Do you mind if I shut my eyes for a bit?”
- Many hospital staff twist the truth, fake reports, mislead outside professionals as to the true state of affairs and cover up for each other. We have extensive evidence of seriously misleading information they have recorded and/or conveyed to outside professionals.
- They miscalculated my daughter’s Ideal Body Weight at admission and ended up restraining her and force feeding her to the point where she was overweight. This caused enormous psychological damage to a vulnerable child who already had body image issues. It took months of fighting for them to even recognise their mistake.
- Staff are unable to even get the food and feeds right. It’s an eating disorders hospital. Pretty much their main job is giving a certain fixed number of calories per day. In one week in December 2020 they missed or miscalculated several feeds and underfed my daughter to the tune of 1,400 calories – almost a whole day’s quota!
- But that wasn’t an isolated incident. We have numerous, numerous examples of them getting the feeds and food wrong. In fact, staff giving medication and feeds are often unable to read the feed chart / medicine chart and therefore making serious mistakes. Staff have often asked my daughter – an anorexic – how many calories she was meant to be having, and fed her accordingly!
- It’s not just food. They couldn’t get even the water right. For several months in early 2021 they had miscalculated the water and were giving her less water than even fluid restricted patients get in acute wards. She was left dehydrated for a quarter of a year!
- And therapy! Therapy is the main route to recovery for patients in an anorexia hospital. My daughter had an average of less than 10 minutes a week in individual therapy.
- My daughter was bullied (by staff!), victimised, emotionally abused, given wrong medication, threatened, manipulated, racially discriminated against and traumatised. She had her legal rights (to an IMHA, for example) curtailed; her laptop, ipad and mobile phone stolen (among numerous other possessions); her data protection rights violated …I could go on.
- When I complained about how they were treating my daughter, they started targeting me. They complained to social services that they suspected me of being a criminal. Once social services cleared me of that RWH put in a referral to claim I was a safeguarding risk and I should be blocked from having my daughter come home. I was again cleared after a detailed investigation. RWH asked social services to reconsider. Social services reconsidered and decided they could not see any safeguarding risk. So RWH put in more and more referrals to social services till social services eventually told them, effectively, “Go away and don’t call us, we’ll call you”. But RWH still persisted and harassed social services to interfere in our lives as a way of punishing my daughter and me for complaining. Fortunately, social services’ position still is, “Go get stuffed”. RWH will go to any lengths to cover up their mistakes, their safeguarding risks, patient abuse.
In the entire year and a half of dealing with this hospital, the only time my daughter made progress was when she came on home leave to me. RWH tried numerous times to disrupt my involvement. Each time my daughter went back to the hospital and didn’t have my input, she regressed. Each time I was allowed back into being involved, or she came on home leave, she progressed.
With my daughter on the verge of discharge I’m now finally ridding myself of having to deal with this hospital and it couldn’t come soon enough.
Warning: Your child is at risk of serious harm in this hospital and if your child is already in this hospital, contact the webmaster of this website to join their campaign. I am authorising the admins of this website to disclose my name and contact details to anyone reading this review who wants to speak with me and get more information. I’ve also learnt a trick or two on how to deal with these people and I’d happily share those with you, so if you have a child in RWH, get in touch with me.