No One Is Free From Harm: A tale of two Atlanta hospital stays

My wife E. Ginger and I both experienced hospital stays last spring, at two different hospitals in Atlanta, and our experiences were quite different.

I was perfectly satisfied and happy with the experience I had, while I told the hospitalists who treated my wife that if I were the hospital CEO they'd be fired for poor patient care.

I am now 83. I had two procedures in May for spinal stenosis, provided by a neurosurgeon and an orthopedic surgeon. The bottom line is I had an excellent outcome. I'm still recovering and getting physical therapy, but the back pain I had is all gone. I've gotten my strength back and my sense of balance has improved significantly.

When I graduated from medical school in 1958, the brightest students weren't going into orthopedics because it wasn't a very challenging specialty. They went into internal medicine or other specialties. But orthopedics is now a very challenging, exciting and rewarding specialty, and it's drawing bright youngsters.

In addition, we now have whole array of other health professionals aside from physicians playing important roles in patient care, such as physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and physical and occupational therapists.

These other professionals played an active role in my care, providing help and information when the orthopedist wasn't available. The physician assistants would frequently visit me in my hospital room. I was willing to have a team of people providing my care, rather than one person. And that team worked well.

A month before that, in April, my wife had an asthmatic attack one night at home and was taken by ambulance to the closest hospital. It has an excellent reputation, but it's not our regular provider.

I expected her to be treated with steroids and come home the next morning. She ended up being there for three days, because the team wasn't well-organized and no one was in charge. It wasn't a good system.

At first I asked for the physician who was taking care of my wife, and I was told he was off. Every day there was a different doctor. I didn't know until the second day it was a group of 20 hospitalists. My impression is this group of hospitalists didn't give much value to personal interaction.

On the day of my wife's scheduled discharge, we were told she'd be going home that morning. So I hired a driver and got there at 11 to pick her up. She wasn't discharged until 4 p.m. because the physician was “on his way.” It wasn't a life-threatening error but we were greatly inconvenienced. That's the kind of thing that angers the public.

I dressed the doctors down and told them they were risking the reputation of the hospital by the quality of care they were giving, because word spreads. I told them they needed to treat the patient, not the chart.

What I got back was, “We're sorry, we had so many patients, we had an emergency.” I was quite angry. I meant to write a letter to the hospital administrators but got busy with other things and didn't do it.

Things can be organized in a way that patients' needs are met, not just medical and psychological needs but human contacts with patients.

Whether my addressing the doctors directly will have an impact, I don't know.