Ratings

[talon]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B25UK20101203

It's not the medicine or treatments that matter, anyway - it's the humane, interactive, informed care that matters.

Lj-cut

I've yet to see a hospital ranking that rated such things as paying attention to the patient, listening to the patient, speaking the patient's language (ie, not doctor speak), treating the patient as a human being (not as a disease, or a condition, and treating only that disease or condition without ever noticing there was a living breathing being attached to it, sometimes not even knowing the name or face of the patient), and/or their "first time fix rate" - how often they treat the real cause (see "listening" and "paying attention").

I don't particularly care if they shove aspirin down the throats of each and every person entering the hospital with a heart attack - as the article points out, most of the time, that's not even the appropriate treatment for it.

What I want to know is how often do patients get decubitis wounds, how often is medication mixed up, how often do patients receive the wrong medication or treatment, how long patients have to wait for treatment, how many different treatments do patients endure for ailments they don't have before the doctors start treating them for the actual problem? How well are the patients treated during this process? Do medical staff (from doctors to billing to janitors) talk to the patient or at the patient or over the patient or as if the patient weren't present?

Too many doctors, hospital staffs, nurses, PAs, etc., treat patients like tech support, zeroing in on the first keyword and running with that even if that's not the actual problem. Then, they have to go back and re-treat and re-treat until they finally (if ever) reach the actual problem, which they would have gotten to months or even years earlier, if they'd just listened to the patient.

I'm not concerned with "standard treatments" and how often a hospital complies with that. I'm more concerned with how often patients get preventable infections and iatrogenic diseases while being treated - a clear sign the hospital isn't caring.