I WAS interested to read Ms Sunman's comments about the patients' lounge at York District Hospital (March 12).

During winter months especially, the hospital has to manage many admissions and discharges.

There is a peak in emergency admissions in the earlier part of the day, but patients going home often await transport so they tend to leave the hospital later in the day. A bottleneck can occur.

Our staff had the idea of the patients' lounge. Somewhere warm, safe and comfortable where patients could wait but which would allow their bed to be freed up.

The lounge also makes it easier for the ambulance service to pick up patients from a single point.

Ms Sunman suggests the patient lounge next to her ward could have been used for the same purpose. To a limited extent this is what we have done in previous winters.

However, it has not been satisfactory for our nurses who are very busy looking after the patients still on the ward, plus the new admissions. It was a concern for them to keep an eye on patients in the ward lounge too.

Between 20 and 25 patients a day have used the lounge during the winter. This has helped us manage the overall needs of patients more effectively this winter and has been well received by most using the service.

It was, however, an experimental idea for this winter and spring only and we will review its effect to see if we would use it in future years.

Susan Acott,

Acute services operational

director,

York District Hospital,

Wigginton Road,

York.

...I MUST respond to the whinging rhetoric by Audrey Sunman about the NHS.

My first real experience of the NHS in action came after a sports accident, and I can only praise the emergency services, RAF, A&E, Chestnut and Cherry wards and the surgeons at Scarborough Hospital.

At York District Hospital the standard of service was also first class, as I experienced Wards 28 and 11, more surgery, physiotherapy and am still attending the osteo outpatients' clinic nearly a year later.

I thought the patients' departure lounge was an excellent and positive way to leave hospital with tea, coffee and sandwich, plus conversation with the attending staff nurse and a bit of Mozart playing in the background.

R Waite,

Windmill Rise,

Holgate,

York.

Updated: 10:41 Wednesday, March 20, 2002