Guess who is in charge of your stay when you are admitted to a hospital?

YOUR doctor?

No.

http://www.hospitalist.com/?gclid=CNjQvvmC_pwCFQEhDQodcikgbQ

spleen in a bicycle accident. She was in the hospital a week being closely monitored as she healed. I don't know if I ever spoke for 10 minutes with the doctor(s) responsible for her care. They were always "on rounds". Looking back, what upsets me is that the kid was in a lot of pain and we never were able to get anyone to prescribe the right medication to take care of that.

walking every floor to find the doc in in charge and find a way to "persuade" them to give the matter their proper attention. But I realize that may have occurred back when docs were Gods.

I heard about this hospital list thing on Thom Hartmann's show. I'm going to send this out.

people have a reputation for rudeness or just not caring for what other people think!

such a function probably DOES ameliorate the relationship between individuals and health corporations. However, the functions of a hospitalist would be defined by the corporation for which they work, so a given hospital in a given financial context, would be managed in a manner appropriate to it's financial (for profit) "needs". Even though the liabilities inherent to such functions might not show up in a specific individual experience, they could be seen in the macro-numbers and most health care consumers, being at a great disadvantage in their own level of medical knowledge, and allied with doctors who have their own reasons for avoiding pro-action, simply CAN'T grasp what is and isn't useful nor available to them. Simply put, I fear a great deal of what happens DEPENDS UPON IGNORANCE and, though a given hospitalist in a given situation may affect some remediation for some individuals, you have to wonder what happens beyond our awareness.

Someone has to decide things and given that necessity, it is best if individuals just do not labor under the false apprehension that they are the ones doing the Choosing.

Hasn't for years. He uses a hospitalist to care for his patients while admitted and gets a full report of their progress from the hospital physician each day and a write up after discharge. He also calls his patients while admitted and checks in with them every day to make sure there are not any problems that are not being addressed from his patient's end. I think the concept is good on a personal level as I actually can spend a few hours a day with him in the evening now.
He still does house calls and 8-9 hours of seeing patients in the office a day.

because there are a few non-profit health care providers still out there who operate almost completely on a professional standards perspective because they are the "low" end of the market, direct care providers, and yet do provide some of the most sought after care-environments, including 501 c 3s that are not-for-profit AND non-religious, groups of care providing professionals, working in community health systems.

This is what I'd like: a hospitalist representative for various kinds of individual care-plans and all the information that comprises that understanding of profit and not-for-profit care choices, to balance the corporate for-profit hospitalists, in terms of the information sets required to make a fully informed decisions and choices, and also Responsibilities.

I'm hoping that hospitalists of this type would allow inclusion of complementary and preventative disciplines, such as : old-fashion osteopathy/skeletal alignments, massage and, of course, more nutritional advice, and diet-exercise accountability plans, etc.

about what was going on. they ended up sending us a doctor who didn't know anything about my father's case and didn't give us any information either. that ticked us off more than anything. here we were trying to find out what was going on with or father and they send us some doctor who didn't know anything. I hate batavia hospital.... and I am dreading having to go there to have my baby. i don't blame the nurses or anything... there were like two nurses for the whole floor. they would leave the tray of food that my father couldn't even feed himself. He got great care once he ended up in the ICU.... but he almost had to die for that to happen. It was a pain in the ass to get ahold of the doctor who knew anything about my dad's situation. I'm going to bet the congress members don't have to deal with that kind of thing, though....

they had no time to feed your father. The ICU nurses have much smaller assignments -- 2 patients as opposed to the 7-12 patients an off shift med surg nurse gets.
When I worked at a hospital there were times that family members would show up -- often between 1pm and 9pm on a Sunday night and demand to see or speak to the patient's doctor. Well, their attending doctor is never going to be there on a Sunday. Ever. The best we can do is call the resident on duty who has gotten report on that patient and you do have to be authorized to get this information, HIPPAA is a privacy act in place to protect patients privacy. The best way to talk to a doctor about an inpatient is to call their office and leave a message and number with the secretary they can call you back at. It may take a while, often after 5pm on a weeknight, but they do call back.

they had been asking for days to talk to the doctor to find out what was going on with our dad. and two of my sisters were his health proxy. I didn't blame the nurses for it. We had tried to set up an appointment to talk to the doctor and thought we HAD an appointment and the guy never showed up. We had brought our father in thinking he had a stroke, but he was trying to leave the hospital and would talk about the air force and think he was in a government building or something. He was NOT like himself. They had done tests and we had waited several days to hear anything. We were not hounding the nurses or demanding anything... but after several days of getting nowhere, we were very frustrated. As I say, we weren't mad at the nurses.... they had their hands full. we were upset that there weren't more nurses on duty.... overworking the nurses that were there and expecting them to be able to cover all the patients. It was just an eye opener for all of us. Our dad had been in and out of this hospital for a couple of years... but he would be there for a couple of days and then go home. and he was capable of ffeeding himself and lucid the other times. this time was different.... And we didn't really notice how short staffed these nurses were until this time.

(although you already did most likely) that hospitals and a lot of doctors are in it for the money. Anything else is just a hassle. And a waste of time since time is money. I quit practicing medicine less than a month ago (I'm 51) after years of doing it the right way, for poor folks almost exclusively, and getting incredible hostility for it from greedy "colleagues".

The way "Health care reform" appears to be going, there will be no honor left in most fields of medicine.

for my husband when his legs were burned in a house fire.

Excuse me?

When did I learn about the proper care and treatment of 2nd and 3rd degree burns. How am I supposed to know when a patient needs to be moved to a burn center or how long they should be in the hospital or what is an acceptable level of pain.

Sorry that happened to you and your kiddo.

Anyone in the hospital needs someone else there, if not all the time, then much of the time, to advocate for them.

The nurses will let you know if something is being done wrong. Bring them candy - they'll love you for it and they are on your side. Then you can raise holy hell with the administrators.

His feet were burned, he should have been transfered to a burn unit.

I hope he's better!

to bat on stuff like this too. The Nurses actually want them to because that makes their work more effective, though there STILL are waaaaaay to few nurses in the halls.

We need smaller 24/7 community not-for-profit, professional health care providing groups. CMS has already provided a more or less common body of information about care.

and that was the only answer he had.

where the person receiving the care has a relatively long-standing relationship to the direct care givers.

The Nurses are amongst the most Competent persons I know. Professional Communities run on their own standards.

with Medicaid insurance with a Republican controlled state directive to keep as much care in-state as possible.

So they kept someone with burns over 1/4 of his body in a hospital that didn't even have a burn unit with nurses who were not trained in treating burns. The doctor watched television when he came into the room, I am not kidding. He released my husband to a local doc with absolutely no burn experience and then went on vacation.

It wasn't the nurse's fault. But it was flat stupid to tell me that I was supposed to become a burn expert in 24 hours when I had 3 homeless kids, a husband in critical condition, and just lost everything I owned in a fire.

Friends and family simply cannot become medical experts overnight.

the link. And people don't realize that INS cos AND hospitals are between their doctors.

:patriot:

and this is the closest I could come to finding what the fuck they actually do.



Corporate bullshit is so painful to read. Leeches - the lot of 'em. Trying to see how much money they can pump from human misery.

Its possible, tho difficult. My brother and I did it last year for our mother.

educate, and some other "ate" that slips my mind at the moment. (ameliorate?) Our local hospital is part of a corporation, as are most of the local docs (been bought out). It sucks because they are pushed to make money by spending as little time as possible on as many people as possible, rather than trying to help people be healthy.

Empirical data/information is ignored at GREAT peril.

I think all of us should focus on what's going on with Americans' health care, Empirically, observable Facts are the best place to commit a continuing effort.

This happened in a well known DC hospital after my cancer surgery. I repeadely buzzed for help when I needed to go to the bathroom. No one showed up during the 40 minutes I waited. Since I really needed to go, I decided that I dont' want to pee in my bed and slowly ventured out of my bed to go to the bathroom. I fell on my back. All of a sudden about 3 nurses showed up to help me. Well hell, what I am suppose to do? They wanted me to submit to a CT scan and x-rays to cover their asses - I guessed. I said no since I had received a CT scan earlier that day. Fortunately, I was not hurt. But they put a sign on my door that said "Fall Area".

After about an hour, I was put on a gurney and takento radiation for x-rays. Again, I refused. So I was left in the hallway in pain by myself until a compassionate x-ray tech said "you should not be left here by yourself in pain like this - I'll take you back to your room, which he did.

My dad fell in the hospital and ended up with a brain bleed.(Subdural Hematoma)

We have Kaiser. Kaiser hires hospitalists to coordinate care for their admitted patients. My husband was in that scary place between life and death for months. It is unreasonable to expect his primary care doctor to visit his bedside and keep up with his medical condition that was ever changing. That hospitalist saved his life more than once - spent a whole night at his bedside at least once.

They can be a very good tool to benefit both the patient and hold down costs.

I stand in awe of what they do almost every day.

... unfortunately, not every physician, when admitting a patient is capable of understanding "best practices" to get the patient-

A) on the most aggressive track to assessment and then treatment, and avoid complications
B) managed properly highly specialized problems out of their general practice (cardiovascular, for example)

So, the concept is one that has actually saved lots of patients. The referring doctor does not loose the patient. This is gaining better outcomes across health care systems. Some health care systems really do have a pretty good idea of not fucking up what they do.