Quote:
Originally Posted by Justputt
I've worked in hospitals for several decades and I've never seen anyone try to kill anyone. I have rarely seen bad doctors and nurses. Poor care is a sad fact in some settings. The patient advocate is a good way to go for a start, then there's Chief Medical Officer, COO and the CEO if you feel the need to be more expressive of a bigger issue and not just an isolated problem you had or saw. By law they have to make available to you a complaint system that usually ends up in the Federal government and/or State's hands. Because of that, I've found hospitals I've worked in to be pretty on top of real issues. Long wait times are not unusual. We all often put off going to our family doctor or clinic until we're really sick, then it's afterhours, which means the ER is the only place open, so off we go.... with everyone else that waited too long. My only complaint with the TV healthcare so far is not taking government Medicare.
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All true. And that's not to say there aren't bad doctors out there---just like there are bad lawyers, dentists, accountants, mechanics and trash collectors. I had to suspend the privileges of two doctors---one was for inappropriately touching a female patient that was under anesthesia (big no-no) and the other for transecting the ureters of 3 women during LAVH in a 6 month span (the average gynecologist will transect 0 or 1 in an entire career). Unlike whatever the media and AARP want you to believe, unlike the deeply flawed Johns Hopkins study that estimated 1/4 million deaths per year due to medical errors, that was the exception, not the rule.