I personally have had my fair share of interactions with the medical system from my own experiences and the experience of Mom who is a RN. With previous medical issues that I had as a child the best care that I have ever received was at the Devos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids. The idea to go above and beyond their call to care for the duration of our stay has been unmatched by any other hospital experience and I think that speaks a lot for the health care system of Spectrum Health. The type of care that my family and I received while we were at the Children’s Hospital has proven to not be the majority standard of care that people across the United States receive.
Since my time at Michigan State I had to take a trip to the ER at Sparrow Hospital and I cannot say enough bad things about the experience that I had there. The amount of time it took the doctors to see me, was insane. In order for them, I think in their minds, to speed up the turnover rate of seeing patients they had a community style room where they took blood samples to be processed before the doctors had even seen the patients. Come to find out almost 5 hours later they “lost” my blood samples and they had to be taken for a second time. The only consultation I had with a doctor that night was a walking consultation from the room that they finally gave me hours into my time there, to x-ray. That was it. There was absolutely no bed-side manner. After that, because of their lack of availability, they kicked me out of the room and put me in a “holding” room which held at least half a dozen people who had the flu. I ended up spending eight hours in that hospital and it was a complete waste of my time. My family and I all agreed that if something were to ever happen again we would drive the hour to GR from Lansing because we could’ve been there and back in less time than it took me at Sparrow to receive almost no information.
After talking to my aunt who is a PA for multiple ER’s in Maine, the experience that I had at Sparrow, is the experience that the entirety of Maine deals with everyday. It has made me appreciate the healthcare system within West Michigan, but sickens me to think about the care that people are receiving all over the United States or the lack there of. With the amount of regulation that our government plays a roll within the healthcare system, we need to be doing better. In my opinion the healthcare system should be focused on the absolute best to treat the patient. Whether that is pharmaceutically or holistically. The goal should not be focused on the turnover rates of hospitals and how they can rack of the dollars. There also needs to be a standard of care set for everyone, not just white men. Women and minorities with out a doubt face disparities within the health care system. Wether its their problems are not being taken seriously or they receive a diminished quality of care, the differences are there, and there needs to be change.
I agree there needs to be a standard of care that isn’t defined by cost or by profit. About 10 years ago I was in a car accident. My sister went though a hard red light and we got T-Boned on my side in a very small chevy malibu. Because of my age and the severity they rushed me to the closest hospital, which was in pontiac, to make sure I was stable before eventually taking me to Royal Oak Beaumont. I was being transferred to their new pediatric trauma center. When I was rolled into Beaumont there was at least 10 physicians surrounding me all analyzing me. One was taking my blood pressure, one was injecting an IV, one was monitoring my neck, one was checking out the hundreds of shards of glass all over my face, and one was giving me an ultrasound to check for internal bleeding. These physicians were going nuts. I’ve never seen anything like it mostly because I haven’t been in a similar life threatening incident but even when I was at the first hospital in Pontiac I only had one nurse with me and another physician. All they could do was stabilize me because they didn’t have tech and couldn’t produce what Beaumont could. With the amount of regulations we find in American health care I can find just as many inequalities and that’s a shame. There has to be some sort of audit agency to keep hospitals accountable, if not there should be.
Yeah, your story is not uncommon, but that is quite a severe story of mismanagement. The McLaren hospital is much better, I’ve had better luck there. The issues that you encountered at Sparrow are less to do with biomedicine itself than health care delivery and capitalism. This becomes a big issue in poor neighborhoods where the hospital doesn’t get enough revenue through either taxes or through patients. It leads to poor quality of care, ineptitude, law suits, and often times closure itself. There is oversights of doctors and hospitals to maintain certain standards, but I don’t know what it is called.