I spent the better part of my day today at the hospital with my mom. It was the first time I had been in this particular hospital in probably more than 15 years. It was recently taken over by some new group and was ‘supposed’ to be making all these improvements. I can say for sure, the only improvement they have made is the lobby.. Once you get past the lobby, everything looks the same as it did the last time I was in the hospital back in the 80’s. The wall paper border around the ceiling is coming down, and you can see where they have used scotch tape to try to hold it up. There was dust all over the place, on top of the support bar on the bed, on the walls, everywhere… There was places on the wall where they plastered over holes, but never repainted it, so just plain raw plaster there (and I am not talking little holes, this plaster area was about 3 foot in diameter). There were marks all over the walls. Like I said, not much has changed since I last was there, the tv’s and beds were still the same. Even has the same phones that were there too…
The interesting part about the whole thing is, there is probably only one floor in the hospital that they have patients on. Just walking around the floor there were plenty of rooms open. But yet they still put another woman in the same room as my mom, even though there were plenty free.. Ok, I can see this since they may be short staffed on the nurse side, but no, there are separate nurses for my mom and the other woman. What is even worse, is my mom can’t get any sleep because of the nurses coming in every 30 minutes to check on the other woman, and the other woman snores extremely loud.
Which gets me back to the state of health care… This hospital is really only used for minor things any more and any thing major they transfer them to other hospitals either in the state or out of the state. So why do they even try to keep it open if for major things they send people to other hospitals. Granted the other hospitals are a minimum of 20 miles away. But I feel that the care given in those would probably be a little better then here.
When I was still living at home the hospital kept talking about how they were going to expand this, and do that, and buy up this land to build that… Well they bought up some of the houses, but just tore them down to make gravel parking lots. The hospital keeps getting little additions added to it, (which none of the additions match the architecture or even use the same brick or try to match the color as the previous addition does) but then they keep cutting back on other areas.
What really got me a little fired up is that they have a room that have signs all over the door, that every one entering must have gowns, gloves and face masks on, yet they have the door wide open and it is in a room right behind where my mom is at. If they have to put 3 or 4 signs on the door about precautions, why don’t they have better isolation between the patients. And why aren’t all the room’s private rooms? One of the local hospitals here is remodeling and putting an addition on and every single room is a private room with a flat screen tv, and it almost looks like a hotel. The hospital my mom is in, almost looks like something you might find in someplace a little better than a third world country.
I do hope they are able to fix a lot of the problems that are there, but there is a long way to go.. And customer (patient) service seems to be the first place they need to start. Whenever you are in so much pain that you can’t sit down and you have to end up standing for almost an hour for some one to see you in an emergency room…. says a lot about the state of the hospital.
The only thing I did see that was good (in part till I got home) was that they are now locking the patients charts in boxes out side of the rooms. This was good, but when I got home and was looking at the hospitals web site, they have a physican portal, which you guessed it, does not even have SSL encryption on it. Just Lovely…. I just hope they don’t have access to patient records through that portal.
And according to their web site the hospital is a : a 73 bed acute care hospital. Founded in 1907, the hospital has a long tradition of providing quality health services to our community.