We have a local practice that specializes in infected wounds, and the first thing the doctor does is get his patients out of the hospital. I had a friend who was treated by him, and he flat said that he can’t cure people who are constantly being re-infected in that “cess pit”.
]]>Until the “for profit” part changes, we will continue to see more and more of this as they cut corners and staff.
LadyMin´s last blog post..H+ Magazine
]]>The problem was staffing, and we let the local administrator know that we didn’t buy his claim of adequate staffing. You don’t run 12 hour shifts if you have adequate staffing.
One of the down-state papers ran a report on Baker Act “escapes” a few weeks ago, and locally one of the patients was killed in an armed stand-off after escaping, the very thing his family was trying to avoid by invoking the Baker Act proceedings. I don’t know if they have the money to sue, but they should.
]]>As far as I know, HCA hasn’t changed their policy on staffing since then — i.e., if you get sick, go anywhere *but* an HCA hospital, because they deliberately kill a certain percentage of patients in order to save money on staffing costs. It doesn’t surprise me that Baker patients manage to escape. The fire doors aren’t allowed to be locked for obvious reasons, there’s no staff to see them go for the fire doors, and patients aren’t allowed to be restrained unless there is sufficient staffing to un-restrain them in case of a fire and of course there isn’t. Indeed, at my mother’s hospital, the “mental wing” as the nurses called it was just an ordinary hospital wing, with no (zero) provisions for dealing with mental health issues. No padded rooms, no strait jackets, there were stretchers with straps but they were allowed to use those only if the patient attacked staff or other patients and had to be restrained for a while to calm him down, they had nothing, just regular hospital rooms and a regular nurse’s station that was usually empty due to lack of staffing.
So that’s HCA. Now you know.
– Badtux the Medical Penguin
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