This happened to me about a year ago. I have several serious life threatening conditions that affect my heart and my lungs.
This particular time I was hospitalized is serious condition after waking up around 04:30 AM gurgurling on my own blood, and was desperately gasping for breath.
The Medics gave me 15 litres of oxygen via non-rebreather mask, and rushed me to the ER. My heart was tachy, and it felt like it was going to jump out of my chest.
As the X-ray tech came to take X-rays, I vomited about 2 1/2 quarts of blood. After I was stabilized, I was placed in a room on 6 litres of oxygen.
This happened about a week before Memorial Day weekend, and it was very hot and humid at the time, but was too early for the hospital to turn on the AC.
I was alright laying flat, and on the 6 litres of oxygen, but when my Pulmonologist entered my room a few days later, he turned down the oxygen to 2 litres, and placed me in the high fowlers position. Everything turned black, and I felt like I was going to pass out, and my heart began to race again. When my Physician and my Pulmonologist saw what happened, I was immediately placed in the TCU, with a monitor placed on me.
Then when Memorial Day arrived, my kidneys began to fail. How do I know? Because what small amount of urine I was putting out was black.
I was so uncomfortable, I eventually asked my nurse, (a GN who clearly did know which end she was supposed to think with,) to please place a cold washcloth on my feet to cool me down. She placed a sopping wet one on my feet, and it made me even more uncomfortable.
A short while later, an 8yo was wheeled in after being ejected from a van in serious condition following a head-on crash with a motorcycle. He died a short while later. How do I know? Because the charge nurse, who had a very loud voice, said; "He's gone."
Needless to say, I did not need to hear that, nor did I want my door wide open without my curtain drawn, and the hall light blaring in my eyes.
I rang my callbell, and asked her if she would turn off the hall light. She said she couldn't do that. So I asked her to pull the curtain so the light wouldn't blare in my eyes.
Her response; "I can't do that, because I need to watch you." My immediate thought was; " Wonder where you went to school, and how much homework did you do, or are you brand new, and not yet trained?
That was the worst experience I had in that hospital. When I mentioned about the boy dying, she asked me if I saw it on TV, or read it in the paper, I told her neither, but I just had a clear show-and-tell experience about it.
After I got discharged, I asked my doctor to please put me on hospice. I did not want to ever even see the inside of that hospital again.
Well, a few months later, I was back in there, but in a much more comfortable room. In fact it was private. But when they came to transfer me into the accute care area, I asked them if they hire brand new graduates and place them in the TCU for training. I said they did not belong in there until they learn something first, because they are placing peoples' lives in jeopardy.
After they got me into the Accute care area, the one nurse whispered in the reveiving nurse's ear about treating me with TLC, because I was onto them.
Is this standard practice in other hospitals, or is this dumbbell experience I had just an isolated incident?
rn/writer, RN
9 Articles; 4,168 Posts
If hospitals are so concerned with customer service (and we know that they are), it might be a wise move to appoint someone--nurse or doc--to serve as a liason between staff and patients/families. I'm not talking about someone who goes to every room, pokes their head in for thirty seconds and says, "Is everything hunky dory?" Nor am I thinking of someone who handles complaints about not enough pillows or the wrong kind of soda.
I'm thinking of someone staff can call in when a patient and/or their family is seriously upset about medical care, unanswered questions, and escalating complaints. A patient advocate but also a staff advocate as well.
In the case of my grandson, we have pressed the nurse manager of the floor, the house supervisor, and the hospitalists into this role and finally felt like we got somewhere. It just shouldn't have take so much effort on our part. What we needed was to know that we had connected with the attendings and residents, that the nurses understood the orders, that orders that had been forgotten would be addressed, that pain management was going to be worked on until a satisfactory solution had been found, etc.
We needed one person to see the whole story. We needed someone who didn't get defensive and actually cut back on or withhold care to punish us for asking questions until we got answers. We needed to know that there were reasons behind the decisions being made and accountability taken. And we needed the freedom to set some limits when residents were actually botching some parts of my grandsons care due to their inexperience and inability to admit that they didn't know everything.
At some point, the patient/family and the frontline staff can rub each other raw. Then it's a godsend to have a knowledgeable person be able to step in as a disinterested intermediary and help to come up with ideas, explanations, and solutions. It is like a cup of cool water in a desert when you feel like someone has actually heard what you have been trying to say. They may not be able to comply with your requests, but it won't be because they tuned you out. From the staff side, it's wonderful when a coworker can see your frustration and help to restore communication.
Someone fulfilling this need might go a long way toward reducing complaints and even lawsuits. Many times, angry people just want someone to listen to them.
Trust is an essential--and sometimes absent--ingredient in the giving and receiving of good medical care.