INPATIENTS treated at hospitals in the South London Healthcare NHS Trust have rated their care as being worse than other trusts in four out of 10 areas.

The results of the Care Quality Commission survey were released today (April 16) and showed patients were not happy about their care and treatment and also the hospital and ward they were in.

Also rated worse than other trusts were operations and patients also marked down the procedure for when they left hospital.

Problems according to the patients included the food on offer, a lack of someone on the staff to talk about their worries and fears and a lack of explanation about how an operation had gone.

It was not ranked as being one of the country’s best performing trusts in any areas.

But in areas including accident and emergency, waiting to get a bed on a ward and waiting list times it ranked about the same as other hospital trusts.

The Trust runs Princess Royal University Hospital in Farnborough and Orpington Hospital as well as Queen Mary's in Sidcup and Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich.

A Trust spokeswoman said: "We welcome the results of the CQC report, measuring inpatient satisfaction at the Trust.

"We continue to work hard to try to improve patient experience, and this survey shows some improvement in several areas.

"However, it also demonstrates that in other areas our improvement programmes are not yet making the impact we had hoped.

"We will examine the results of the survey in detail and use it to develop new ways of working which will help improve patient experience further.

“Patient feedback is vital to enable us to improve, and we undertake a number of real-time surveys on wards and departments which allow us to measure how patients feel they have been treated.

"This includes the new Friends and Family test.

"We encourage all patients to feedback to us on their care and treatment, either via surveys on the wards or by contacting us direct.”