7 Dirty Secrets of Hospital Stays

Posted by nurse on August 25, 2011 under Critical Care, patient health | Be the First to Comment

In the advertising dreamworld most healthcare companies project in the media, sick patients get wonderful care with full focus on them as individuals. Health is a concept everyone strives for. Hospitals on television look like wonderful clean places where healing takes place with pretty nurses, big smiles, and witty humor. But in reality, patients can share a room with a marijuana smoking person covered in tattoos who treats the room like a Holiday Inn to be trashed.

Nurses know the dirty truth regarding how much patients have to deal with once admitted. They are ironically the lowest ones on the item pole, while being billed the entire time. Hospitals can be dirty, understocked, understaffed, and full of distractions that make patients feel like they are recovering from treatment on third base at Yankee Stadium, only noisier. Privacy is a joke, and sleep is a forgotten memory. And for a lucky few, there is more discomfort ahead.

1. Patients Can’t Read up on Medications

A doctor visiting a patient at bedside has to take their drug recomendation at face value. Without Internet access, they can’t double check medications with even serious side effects. Patients can be in the course of a therapy very harmful to them, or their mental state and not know it. Without full disclosure of side effects (and even allergy tests) no patient should be gulping down new meds on five seconds notice. But patients are often given no choice.

2. Hospitals Fill Beds on Quotas

A patient may wonder why their condition this week merits admission to the hospital, wheras the same condition last week did not. The fact is, most hospitals operate close to a very thin profit margin and look for patients to admit with a high probability of breaking even or profiting. If a few beds are empty, the company can draw from the emergency room for patients too eager to get admitted to read the fine print. Then the discharge orders come when better insured patients apply for treatment.

3. Bed Rest Isn’t Good for You

Two thirds of the American public is overweight. The last thing they need is to be enforced with bed rest and nonstop meals. Hospital food is so bad some nurses and physicians include stool softeners with the checkout forms. With some advance notice a patient might eat lightly, or drink more water, or even bring some fruit or preferred snacks. The diabetic menu at many hospital is not necessarily about calories, just substituting protein and nutrients for sugars and fats. And the noise of the hospital hallways can be compared to an airport runway with machines, beeps, other patients and the turbulence of nurses running in and out every 5 minutes.

4. The Compliance Game

Nurse, physicians and staff play a game concerning the patient’s participation in their care plan. if a patient asks questions, demands to speak to the doctor, questions dosages or asks for basic assistance, nurses may telegraph to each other the patient is “difficult”. This keeps nurses from answering call buttons and physicians from absorbing comments. Once a nurse tags a patient as difficult, most of what they say to administrators or customer service personnel is discounted.

5. You Never See the Bill

The patient’s healthcare bill is coded in a complex set of abbreviations, medical language codes, and unreadable shorthand for hospital procedures. Without keeping track of what tests were performed when, and how many blood samples were taken, a patient has no control over hat they are being billed. Any other business transaction on the planet allows the customer to examine the bill. But the person who suffers is the patient, whose healthcare company may rate them a risk because their care appointments have bloated fees and additional charges.

6. Mistakes Are Invisible

The sheer volume of processes one ward of patients can bring to a hospital creates a logistical nightmare that requires administrative coordination to execute smoothly. But the behind the scenes errors are often smoothed over so all patients see are one more stool sample, and on more hypodermic needle going in. Mistakes are common and mixups are legion, especially in busy hospital departments where too many handoffs are incomplete and information flying too fast for medical personnel to keep up. Just watch how many times nurses try to take a patient to an appointment they don’t have.

Perhaps the dosage orders and treatment advice does not kick in until the next nurses’s rotation, leaving the patient to wonder why the doctor told them something different. The fewer opportunities a patient has to review labels, doctor’s orders, fine print, and notes, the less they know about the wrong thing going on. Mistakes in billing and mismatched codes, incomplete paperwork and confusion between clinic appointments and departmental visits can spell disaster. An these incidents are all too common.

7. Patients Cannot Be Choosers

In almost every vertical business channel in commerce today, customers can vote with their feet or wallets which services are the best and what they want. Except in medical care, where patients are almost always the victim of transportation problems, family disputes, caregiver schedules, and/or limitations in ability to attend appointments, and general inability to deal with their illness going forward. Any complaint made usually makes the client suffer. In this case, the patient has to deal with the likely pointlessness of dealing with an issue with medical staff because they are the likely source of return or follow up care.

Frankly, individuals made to stay in a hospital for three days might take better care of themselves if they learned what kind of punishment they were in for down the line.