Aug 07 2009
A Happy Hospital Story
For background, see here, here, and here.
This morning, my father, brother, and I met with several St. Michael’s staff, including the director of the medical staff and the director of the nursing staff. It was a very cordial and informative meeting for me, and I hope it was for everyone else. We all left the room on the same side, so I’d call that success.
Of course, one thing that helped from our point of view was that the St. Michael’s staff was obviously very upset that such things had happened and were anxious to tell of us ways they’d already worked on to prevent such in the future. This, basically, is what we wanted.
The nursing supervisor on duty when my step-mom fell was devastated that something like that had happened on her watch.
We, as patients, learned a lot about how some hospital systems work. For example, we learned that when we need to call a nurse to be sure to say what we need, as they can get the message to the right person more quickly.
The director of medical staff explained some of the problems they were having implementing a hospitalist program and contracting with a separate firm for ER physicians. It was quite honest of him to say that these two groups of physicians do not always cooperate in a timely manner and explained how the hospital was working on this problem.
When we asked whether charges for the x-ray after the fall would be included in the bill, we were told it didn’t matter whether they were or not. Now this was upsetting at first – it seemed like the hospital was not taking responsibility for something they admitted was their fault.
But we were oh so wrong. That’s not it at all. My step-mom has Medicare and no matter what tests or procedures or how long she was in the hospital, they were going to paid the same, based on her problem at admission. To my way of thinking, that just ain’t right.
The final conclusion I have come to is that if the hospital staff had all got together and planned to have my father and step-mom treated as they were, they could not have planned it to be quite as bad as it was. These episodes are likely random ones and we were the unlucky family that lost the coin flip twice in a row.
