To avoid repeating myself, the letter I wrote to the UCD Medical Center patient relations (patient.relations@ucdmc.ucdavis.edu) is posted here:
I called the patient relations phone line today regarding the following issues and I was told to forward them to this email address.
I was checked in the UCD Medical Center on Jan 31st and I am still waiting to get discharged. I stay in room XXXX. My illness was infectious and required isolation. During my two weeks of stay I was given overdose medication twice, my request to speak to the doctors were ignored, some doctors and nurses were rude, and many of the doctors are incompetent and can't explain or give misleading/wrong information on simple medical questions. I will go in detail on each of them.
Medicine Overdose:
On 2/4/2009, Dr. Stuart Cohen prescribed Capreomycin for me to be injected through IV. On 2/5/2009, Dr. Cohen decided to use Amikacin to replace Capreomycin for ease of monitoring of drug side effects. But the nurse mistakenly injected both Capreomycin and Amikacin to me on the same day. I have informed Dr. Cohen and other doctors and nurses when I found this out. The overdosage caused nausea, dizziness, muscle pain, and weakness. At one time I almost fainted.
On 2/9/2009, I was given two dosage of 600 mg of Linezolid by the nurse while I was prescribed one dosage of Linezolid. Side effects: muscle pain, headaches, nausea.
Patient Care:
While I am thankful for many of the nurses and doctors who were helpful during my stay, I am also appalled by some others who were negligent, ignorant, and incompetent. I'd like to thank Dr. Cohen, Dr. Eison, Dr. Wu, and medical student Kate Sigford for their time and effort to provide me the right medical care and listening to my requests.
For one, I expect that when my treatment is changed (change of medicine, dosage etc.) I have the right to know and I have the right to speak to the doctor who should explain to me why the treatment was changed. There were multiple occurrences where my treatment was changed but none of these times the doctors discuss with me first. Only when I found out the change of treatment and request to speak to the doctor was I able to understand and sometimes persuade the doctors to reverse the change of treatment due to my reactions to the side effects of the drugs.
Another problem with the patient care is that too many people get involved in my treatment and too few people can make the decision. There are two teams of doctors involved in my treatment, infectious disease and internal medicine. There are at least 4 people on each team. My understanding of this convoluted system is that the infectious disease doctors recommend my treatment, the internal medicine doctors prescribe the drugs and make orders of procedures. Often times the nurses have no idea who they should talk to when I have a question. The doctors don't know each other's names and during my two weeks of stay, both team were swapped with new people.
On somedays I have both team coming in listen to my lungs and chest (imagine 4-5 doctors coming in one after another and doing the same thing), and on other days when I request to see one doctor to check my lab result, and none of them show up. There are times when one resident doctor on the internal medicine team came to see me but unable to answer my question, they have to talk to the infectious disease team to have them come to see me, who after discussing with me would make an recommendation to the internal medicine team for a different treatment or making an order of a procedure. Can you see what's going on here? There were many confusions between the doctors and nurses as to what my treatment plan was, what procedures were ordered, which lab results are available and so on. Mixed in between these, some nurses were yelling at me and some doctors refused to help me in any way because they were on call (not on my primary doctor team) and my request was not an emergency and so on. There were also discrepancies between the the treatments of different doctors, some say I could go out side for a walk, and some others strictly prohibit me to do so.
As one example of the doctors incompetence, I was ordered to provide sputum samples everyday to monitor my recovery. One doctor was very specific that I have to produce the sputum sample in the morning. But I don't have a lot of mucus in the first place, and normally I can't cough them out in the morning. Sometimes I cough them out in the evening. The fact is, while it's preferable to have sputum samples from the morning to avoid contamination, this is not strictly required. Good samples can be produced other times of the day. The respiratory staff (who actually does the lab) confirmed this to me. However the doctors throw away or refused to accept many sputum samples simply because they were not produced in the morning. There are also other occurrences when I asked some safety questions on procedures such as installing a PICC line on my arm, the resident doctor gave me made up answers which were inaccurate and misleading. The problem with many of the doctors is they won't just say "I don't know" or "I'm not sure," rather they would try to make up answers which just don't make sense. This severely damages the trust between patients and the doctors.
As for the hospital environments, it's just unbelievable bad. In the first week, my vital signs were checked every few hours including in the middle of the night, even though I was in a very stable condition. I have blood drawn every morning at 4am, sometimes multiple times a day. There were people constantly going in and our of my room and the doors make big noise. I barely had much sleep for the first week, making me exhausted in addition to the side effects from the drug treatments I have to endure. After my repeated complain to the doctors, they finally changed my blood drawing to once a week and vital sign check once every 12 hours. Only in the last few days were I able to sleep continuously for more than a few hours without being woke up.
As you probably can tell from the amount of complains I listed above (and they are not exhaustive), I am very dissatisfied about my stay at the hospital. I can't wait to get out of here. I have contemplated to talking to ACLU, TV news stations, attorneys on multiple occasions to express my complain. I hope you take my concerns seriously and make an effort to address them not just for me but for all the patients who might come through your door.
Well, to be fair, UCD Medical Center probably isn't the worst hospital in the world, that's a gross exaggeration. Maybe half of the nurses and doctors I met there are competent and nice. But it's far from being a good hospital. It's not very hard to measure the quality of a hospital. A simple benchmark on patient care is how many medical error are made. Medical errors directly impact patients' well being, which is the main reason why a patient is visiting a hospital. Medical and procedure errors are serious, people die because of them. If a hospital makes little or no medical errors, it should receive a passing grade of C. From that point on, you can consider other quality of care such as food, environment, nurse and doctor attentiveness and so on. So, for now I would have to give UCD Medical Center a letter grade of F.
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