I visited my 12-year-old friend Sophie at Boston Children’s Hospital today. Despite the month of inpatient chemotherapy that she has endured, she was sensitive to my own mood and asking about me. I asked if she was getting bored and she replied that there was always a lot of activity. “There are volunteers who come by every few hours to ask if I need anything.” Were they helpful? “They’re annoying. If I had the energy to see people, I would be seeing my friends.”
8 thoughts on “12-year-old perspective on hospital do-gooders”
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I can’t speak to a 12 year old’s perspective, but the problem I have found with hospitals is that the patient is placed on the hospital assembly line and associated timeline. So you get a weighing and a blood test at 3:30 AM, and then a chest x-ray at 5:30 AM, and then breakfast at 9 AM, and so on throughout the day.
When you would like interaction, no one is around, when you want to be left alone, there is all sorts of stuff the hospital needs done to be done.
Instead of some assembly line / JIT scheduling system incentivized to prioritize hospital demands, it will be nice when technology, payrolls, etc., can rearrange hospital demand schedules to prioritize patient needs.
Most do-gooders are in it for themselves, to satisfy their own needs and fulfill their own fantasies.
Ask any soup kitchen manager about the Christmas and Thanksgiving volunteers. These people MUST serve meals on Thanksgiving and Christmas. No other day will do. No other service will do.
Having spent four nights recently in a local hospital, I wrote the hospital
CEO to ask as to why it’s deemed prudent to wake patients at 4AM for
rudimentary procedures that could easily be performed at other times.
My favorite is when a nurse or candystriper wakes you up at 5am to
“see if you need anything”… What happened to resting?
The volunteers are mainly elderly folk who seem incapable of doing anything
other than asking you to repeat yourself two or three times because they are
hard of hearing. Sigh…
Those rudimentary procedure take place at 4AM because around those hours (usually between the hours of 11PM – 6AM) is the only time when those machines are near ideal and can be utilized for none emergency scheduled data gathering. Other times, they are allocated for appointments or emergency use.
As for “hospital assembly line” mentality, that’s required to get persistent data. Anything less, and the hospital will be swamped with lawsuits — so thank our system, our lawyers, and small amount of consumers who will exploit this system.
George,
Your post has me worried. How does 11pm to 6am constitute non-emergency
data gathering time? Are you saying hospitals know that these hours will be slower in the ER? Or are you implying that there are only so many thermometers
and blood pressure cuffs to go around in the average hospital?
Being an unfortunate ER patron for many nights over the past year, I can say
with certainty that there are nearly as many ER patrons at 4am as there are at
4pm, at least at my local hospital.
Maybe it’s also easier for hospital staffers to gather these non-emergency tests in the middle of the night, patient rest and well-being be damned.
PS
My spouse and I were awakened at 5:30AM in my wife’s hospital room the morning after she’d suffered through the grueling delivery of our first child to be shown a presentaion on hospital-sponsored baby photos that were available for purchase. !! This, with my wife suffering 4th degree tears and other fun stuff from the night before. I asked the staffer why it was necessary to wake suffering patients at pre-dawn hours for such a relatively inane subject and the only answer I received by was a bunch of stammering followed by uncomfortable silence before my wife finally broke in with “we’ll take it!”.
There are 2 kind of data gathering: a) regular check point data gathering such as blood pressure, temperature, etc.; this has to be done on the clock, and b) CAT scan, MRI, XRay, etc.; this per Dr. order — you will be waken up for both. You will get (b) done at wee hours because those are the times when the machines are most idea.
As for your 5:30 AM wake up call to sell you baby pictures — that’s so odd, unusable and out of place. If I were you, I would complain right and left and make sure they got the message.
George: A patient complain to the hospital? What would be the point? The patient is not the customer. The insurance company or Medicare/Medicaid is the customer and a complaint from them would be worth considering. Hospitals do a great job of serving customers. You just have to remember that the patient is not among them.
@philg: I never thought about it from that angle. If complaint doesn’t get us anywhere, how about rioting, no? Given the rise of medical care cost (and collage education) once the middle class starts to feel the pinch, I would not be surprise calls for riot.