Checking out of a certain expensive University Hospital is a traumatic experience. This is understood by any who have had to do it more than once.
Having been told that your elderly ailing family member is to be released the following day, you have to psyche yourself up to face the incompetence and ineptitude that starts at the nurses centre of the “Very Expensive” ward, and haunts you through every single step of the multi level back and forth process.
After forty five excruciating minutes of no one knowing what is going on, you are yourself ready to be admitted. Your relative is now muttering rubbish and getting agitated about going home. His wife is getting anxious and the pressure is on.
The nurses are rude and invariably uncaring. You find out, after becoming rude yourself, that “Doctor has to discharge tha patient”.. So now to find the Physician who surely should have done this when his surgery was notifying you he was being discharged this morning… no?
More tantrums seem to be the only way to achieve this. You are shapeshifting into a banshee.
The Accounts Dept from long practice are necessarily off-hand and mute. All the tech in the place is reduced to nothing when systems just do not seem to be able to link to each other. Why does it take 45 minutes for accounts to know what the pharmacy dispensed -it is a real time process after all ? You the client are expected to sort out the pharmacy and take the account to accounts!!!
It is only once you have totally lost the plot in an undignified explosion at the Nurses Counter that someone actually heaves themselves out of a chair and thinks they’d better get this mad person some service.
Having put up with being shoved from one end of the hospital to the other, and it’s a massive place, after 2 hours one is physically exhausted and a mental wreck. But you are not done yet, because the ward has not been made aware that the patient is actually going home and so nothing has been done to prep him. The same ward that yesterday told you he was being discharged the following day. The same ward that seems to feel an uncooperative and cantankerous old man should be disciplined.
The patient’s wife has, in that 2 hours you were trying to complete the account and discharge procedures, been trying to get anyone with an once of compassion to attend to the patient, clean him up, remove all the pipes and tubes and get him dressed to leave this awful place. She is literally ignored.
What should be a straightforward process in a place that charges more for accommodation than 7 star hotels is reduced to a shambolic, traumatic experience.
Finally after some 4 hours of serious stress all around, he is in a wheel chair….And then they bring lunch!
How can an institution charge so much money for the ‘privilege’ of being accommodated and yet treat the guest/patient with such utter disdain, and place the onus of completing a discharge on the paying client.
Yet we will go back for more of the same the next time one of us has to be admitted to hospital because, as I hear it, others are even worse and you could die of old age just trying to be discharged!
January 29, 2022
Last Updated on February 9, 2022
