The writer's valuable insights were learned from real-life experience and not in a lecture hall nor scientific laboratory.
"Residents went from stretcher to stretcher, sorting out patient dispositions."
This gives insights as to how the big, famous teaching hospital doctors in training find and prioritize the patient's primary medical problems, and how insightful they are about deciding which information is taken further, and which information is ignored out of naïveté, inexperience, or plain old incompetence (like this patient's knee and hip).
This is a serious weakness of the big university teaching hospital setting, and often a strong, well administered community hospital can provide better, more patient-centered care overall.
Teaching hospitals are focused on research which needs subjects, and are more centered on training the doctors. That's not to discredit them....we are blessed to have so many of them. But every system has its weaknesses.
These are all things consumers need to educate themselves about. And thankfully, we still can choose one hospital over another.
This ability to choose hospitals and doctors should be prized and guarded with all our might.....amidst glad hand politicians--grossly lacking insight--vying to legislate their "legacy of reform".
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