our own system

Mark Hurst writes …:

Matt’s story about his hospital visit is instructive on two levels. First, his experience mirrors what is said all too often about the hospital patient experience: medical staff, even if capable and effective, don’t create an efficient or especially comfortable environment.

… about Matt Haughey’s “adventure in brain tumors:”

I came away from this experience feeling the OHSU hospital in Portland continues to impress me with its amazing staff, but that the process of dealing with patients could be done in a more efficient manner. I know they all sort of kept an internal log of my story but to constantly be asked the same things by different groups of people and then not know who is your main decision maker was a challenge. Given my state of sickness and exhaustion, I felt like what an elderly man might feel like in the medical system. I had trouble understanding what people were saying as they woke me from sleep, I was constantly poked and prodded without descriptions of what results entailed, I literally wanted to “phone a friend” when those surgeons asked me in the early morning hours what I wanted to do.

It’s an insightful perspective on the majority of healthcare’s inability to effectively relate to the patient’s experience.  Yes, safety comes first and those processes (checking patient identification…) will forever remain in place (as long as they are necessary).  But we certainly struggle to grasp the patient’s view of care—the macro individualized experience.

No, it’s not nursing and medicine and lab and food and pharmacy and radiology and environmental services and the operating room, etc.

It is the hospital.