After being treated at the eye clinic at Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup, my wife suffered a recurrence of the discomfort.

So on Sunday morning I telephoned the hospital to be told an ophthalmologist would be available in the urgent care unit from 9am.

On arrival, more eye patients arrived, and we waited, but at 10am we were told that no ophthalmologist would arrive and that we must go to St. Thomas’s in London as no other local hospitals had an ophthalmologist on call.

The staff at Queen Mary’s were professional and caring, but informed us that it was nothing to do with the hospital as it was a completely separate unit.

As patients, we don’t care about the politics of hospitals. We just go to be healed.

To treat people like this when they are at their most vulnerable is shocking and disgraceful and it put me in mind of hospitals in the third world.

Barry Thwaites
Beverley Road
Bromley Common