A couple days ago, my mother had an accident. She fell down the stairs, broke her wrist and suffered other bruises that have caused extensive pain. She called me at work right after it happened and I rushed home to take her to the hospital. We went to the Sibley Hospital emergency room. After hearing about the state of Greater Southeast and after watching the movie Sicko, I was prepared for the worst.
I was surprised though because the care at Sibley actually turned out to be great. We were in and out pretty quickly, with my mom wrapped up and all the tests complete. But we were lucky.
What this experience accentuated was the disparity of care our city. Even with the same insurance carriers, care can differ based on neighborhood and hospital. A human life is a human life, regardless of economic status. Everyone deserves the quality care that my mother was lucky to receive at Sibley Hospital. We must all fight to ensure that there are facilities east of the river and elsewhere that provide the same level of care.
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I recently had to use the emergency room services at Washington Hospital Center for appendicitis. While I received exceptional care there, the wait to get the care was completely ridiculous. I waited over 8 hours to even be seen by a doctor, and that was because someone finally realized what I was in for and moved me to the front of the "line"!
On a seperate incident, my partner dropped a wood chisel, blade first, onto his foot. Cut right through to the bone. Seeing how long I waited to get in at the Washington Hospital Center, he went to Providence. He waited even longer, received sub-par care (they closed the wound with super glue, which later became very infected), and provided no type of follow-up. In fact, they didn't even try to pretend that they cared! The primary problem there? Overwhelmed staff with too many people too see.
So, I suppose my point is our care, or experience with it, was a result of needs not being properly met. We used the same hospitals as everyone else in our neighborhood and it didn't appear to me that we were favored (or unfavored!) either because of our insurance, perceived ability to pay, the location of the hospital or our home address. It definitely seemed to be a factor of an overwhelmed emergency room staff.
During both experiences, we witnessed people in the emergency room with issues/medical questions that were clearly not emergencies or a result of not having insurance. If there were other options, perhaps emergency rooms could provide better, timely care, for emergencies. Even if the option was available through emergency, i.e. someone triaged them and moved them to either emergency, or routine, this would help with quality of the care. But the emergency room at the hospitals simply aren't equipped to do both.
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