Woman says she has lost faith in King’s Lynn hospital after miscarriage
Patient describes being 'dismissed' at Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s early pregnancy unit and cites earlier care concerns as trust breaks down
A woman who miscarried after seeking care at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in King’s Lynn said she has “lost complete faith” in the hospital and will not return, accusing staff of dismissing her when she experienced bleeding in early pregnancy.
Emma Simmonds, 41, told the BBC she attended the QEH early pregnancy unit in 2023 after bleeding at almost 11 weeks. She said she was told to come back the next day and later learned her baby had died. In a separate account of care going back to 2018, she said she had earlier been under the hospital’s gynaecology department while being investigated for possible endometriosis and was removed from a waiting list after failing to attend a physiotherapy appointment she said she had never been told about.
Simmonds said she later discovered the missed appointment was for another patient with the same name. She complained through the hospital’s Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) and said neither PALS nor consultants overseeing her care had flagged what she described as a data mix-up or apologised for it.
"I lost complete faith in them," she said. "Nobody should ever, ever, have to feel like that. I don't want to ever, ever, go back to that hospital because even after going through the complaints department and everything, nothing came of it." She also told the BBC her GP was "disgusted" by what had happened.
Chris Bown, interim managing director at QEH, said: "Our patients deserve the highest standards of care, and we apologise in any circumstance where we do not meet these standards." He encouraged patients and their loved ones with concerns to contact the PALS team.
After the miscarriage, Simmonds was referred to the recurrent miscarriage clinic at The Rosie Hospital in Cambridge, where she said it took 12 weeks to receive diagnoses of endometriosis and adenomyosis. Endometriosis is a condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows elsewhere in the body; adenomyosis occurs when tissue that normally lines the womb grows into the muscular wall of the uterus.
The accounts of care come as new government-published league tables rated QEH among England’s worst-performing acute hospitals. Hospital leaders have previously acknowledged pressures including staffing and funding constraints across the NHS; the interim managing director reiterated that concerns are taken seriously and urged anyone with issues to contact PALS.
Support organisations and details of services for people affected by miscarriage were noted by Simmonds and are available via the BBC Action Line. The hospital did not provide further detail about Simmonds’s complaint beyond its general statement on standards of care and advice to use PALS.
Simmonds said her experience left her determined to raise awareness about how patients are treated. "There is a culture not to complain... but actually I feel like we need to because the way lots of people are being treated is not OK," she said. "The excuses of funding and lack of staff... is not the patients' fault."
The hospital’s comments and Simmonds’s account reflect wider concerns about patient experience in parts of the NHS amid resource challenges. The woman’s complaint remains an individual account of care at QEH, and the hospital has pointed patients to PALS for formal enquiries and support.