For patients to expect the best care possible, is now considered ‘combative’?

Today in the Kamloops Daily News (03/30/12), I was deeply disturbed to read a letter from a husband whose wife has been a patient at Royal Inland Hospital.  He stated:

Instead of being able to recoup and recover she was kept awake all night by patient buzzers in the hall, for three days made to use a public unisex washroom that had a sign put on it that the public was not to use it as it was for the patients in the hallway...of which there were three at that time.

I ask, and have asked before, what kind of care and recovery will a patient have when they are put in hallways to recover?  But that is not the only issue or problem people are experiencing with stays in the hospital.  With limited space available, we now have medical staff who are discussing patient care, and needs, amongst other people who should have NO part in these discussions – they however have no choice.

The letter writer went on to say:

With no privacy, her medical condition was being discussed in the hallway where others could hear private information. Your hospital has signs all around to ask that staff not talk about patients and honor their privacy, yet, how do patients get privacy when their physician has to consult with them in a hallway with nothing but curtains around them in a public area?

Should patients not expect that matters personal to them should be kept private? When this kind of patient care becomes more and more the norm, should patients and family not have the right to question it, and to demand it stop?  Apparently not:

When my distraught wife called me at 11:30 p.m. on the third night after being called "combative" by a hospital personnel I was extremely upset. She had dared to ask that her sheet be changed after three days of lying in bed and it being dirty; she was basically told they would get her a new sheet but she would have to change it herself.  After a full hysterectomy, how could she have been combative? She could barely walk without assistance let alone change a sheet on her own bed.

So to expect professionalism from medical staff – to expect to have the best care possible – to expect to have a room where recovery can take place – to expect to have clean floors – to expect to have clean sheets - to expect modern maintained equipment – is to now be considered ‘combative?

I for one have to say I am disgusted by what is happening – and to read a letter like this.  The whole system appears to be collapsing, and the question has to be asked why.

Setting the tone and priorities of patient care has to come, and start, at the top.  The heads and management of the Interior Health Authority need to start providing answers.

In Kamloops I’m Alan Forseth, with the thoughts of one conservative.