A PATIENT'S praise for Poole Hospital has gone viral, with more than 11,000 likes and almost 8,000 shares of a post detailing what happened when he took his wife into A&E on one of the busiest nights the hospital has ever had.

Wayne 'Spudgun' Richards, who works at Tesco Extra in Tower Park, was at the hospital's A&E department on September 8 with his wife Michelle and praised the hospital's 'passionate and professional' care, despite some staff working a reported 14 hours without a break.

“Saw the real side of our NHS at Poole Hospital last night, one of the busiest Saturday nights they've had," wrote Wayne. "At one point there were 98 people waiting to be seen in A&E with eight ambulances waiting to unload their patients and not even standing room in the waiting area.

"Behind the scenes there were ambulance trollies queued down the corridor. The waiting time went from four hours at 10pm to nine hours by 2am. There was nowhere near enough nurses, doctors or primary care assistants to deal with it. But did they stop smiling? No, they carried on rushing around trying to deal with everyone with passionate and professional care."

Wayne said that around 2am, a young nurse on her break from the Intensive Care Unit arrived, after hearing how bad things were, to assist her colleagues for an hour. "She came back at the end of her own shift and just waded back in to care for patients."

According to Wayne the staff working on A&E didn't have a break that evening. "When things started to calm down a bit at 7am, the staff nurse, a guy called Toby, didn't grab the chance to stop and have a break. He came to me and the other relatives who had been waiting with patients apologising for the wait and offered us a hot drink. Some of these people had been there up to 14 hours.

"This is our wonderful NHS, overstretched and running on a shoestring but with such dedicated professional care staff from paramedics, care assistants, nurses, porters, working long shifts with no breaks. They don't let their frustration affect their job or the way they deal with patients, drunks, abusive yobs, elderly people who have had falls and don't even know where they are; their dedication and tolerance is a testament to the brilliant health service we have."

Chief operating officer Mark Mould commended staff for their hard work and dedication. “I’d like to place on record my thanks to our staff in the emergency department, and across the hospital, after the unprecedented demand over the weekend of the 8th and 9th September,” he said.

“We have so many staff who are dedicated to their job and they will do whatever it takes to provide the best possible service to our patients, even in the face of operational challenge."

To say thank-you, Tesco provided hospital staff with a trolley of fruit, cakes, doughnuts and chocolate.