Sick Leave

There are many things wrong with healthcare in this country. One of them being that it isn't universal, but one thing I haven't seen talked about as often is how inhumane it has become.

Now I don't know how it is in non-public hospitals, but in the public emergency rooms I have been to, they are hellish. Each time I've gone with Her, it is a 5 hour wait, just to get to a smaller waiting room to wait for a doctor. Once, we had a 5 hour wait in the emergency room and then were moved upstairs to a small waiting room, where we waited for 5 more hours, before being sent home with perscriptions.

The problem with it isn't the wait. I understand, thanks to bureaucracy and sheer number of patients, it does take a while to get seen by a doctor and that people needed to be sorted, but that doesn't mean the people should just be made to wait until they are seen. What would have made the 10+ hour wait easier is for someone to come out and tell us (or call us back) how long it would be, even just a projection.

We had to go on Christmas Eve Eve because of how sick she was and ended up leaving after waiting for six hours because there were six people in front of her, baring any emergency cases coming in. That was just not worth the wait. Estimated wait time is a huge thing, if I am waiting with Her, and my back is acting up and I can't sit in those chairs or stand up, I should go home, but if she only has 2 people in front of her, I would try to tough it out. Or take Her, she has a degenartive disorder that makes it very painful for her to sit in those chairs for long periods of time. It would be nice, if after sitting in the chair for six hours, we knew she'd see a doctor in twenty minutes rather than "I can't tell you" or "Soon." Which I have found in doctor speak means somewhere between now and never.

Another thing is doesn't that open the hospital up to liability? If I come into the hospital, with say, a broken arm and the guy sitting next to me for the past two hours has the death plague and I catch it from him, could I sue the hospital?

This question is especially relevant when you consider bird flu, given how deadly it supposedly is, if one of the first cases in the US went to an emergency room to seek help, it would take over 2 hours before they even realized what it was. 30-40 people could be infected in that time.

Oh and the literature that the hospital puts out states that the emergency care facility (newspeak for emergency room) handles 250 patients a day. Roughly 11 an hour. I've been to that place 4 times in the last 2 months and I can tell you, that's a lie.

On average, 4-12 people were called back each hour, but a majority were either being called back to do vitals or to get blood taken, very few people (1-2) were going back to be seen by a doctor. Another interesting fact I noticed is this, more people are called the first twenty minutes of an hour than in the next forty. At about five past, they would call a group of 4 names and then another group at fifteen past. For the rest of the hour they would call one name maybe every ten minutes. I didn't understand how that was working out. The only thing I could attribute that to was proccessing time.

Something else that bothers me about our system is how meaningless appointments seem to be. Going to Her's appointments we have waited from two hours to six hours for the doctor. What the hell. I shouldn't have to wait six hours for the doctor when I made an appointment. And of course, like the emergency room, they have no idea how long the wait will be nor can they tell us why it is taking so long.