How could American hospitals be improved?

Figure out a way to prevent the infections that seem to be inevitable after a particular time of stay. I would worry if I had to stay in a hospital for more than 48 hours.

Figuring out a new sensible structure for hospital accounting. Charge for actual cost of materials, so that a band aid is only a dollar, instead of $629.

I recently got to “enjoy” a week long hospital stay so this is great question for me.

As mentioned above:
1) Reduce Infections
2) Billing is a joke
3) Tun off extraneous low level alarms. Make required alarms quiet but ring at central console. Every time my Iv would run out it would alarm. And beep every 10 seconds sometimes for half an hour before someone would respond. “Oh I’t’s not critical. That is just the antibiotic. We’ll give you the next dose in 6 hours.” “Then why the F does it have to alarm right next to my head when I am all drugged up and trying to sleep?!?!?” I downloaded the manual, read it and then shut off the alarms myself after that. No one noticed.
4) Time the various interruptions so the patients are not woken up every 10 minutes for food, IV, vitals, blood draws, alarms, catheter checks,, etc…. Give the patients a chance to sleep uninterrupted for at least 2 hours a couple of times a day. . .
5) Teach the staff that patients are watching and want to feel that they are serious about the work. Don’t be yapping with your partner about the wedding you are attending while you are drawing bloods or taking vitals. Pretend you care about this unmoving body in the bed. Even though I am on pain meds and not moving I can hear you talking and frankly some of your conversations scare me.
6) Pay the staff a few dollars more and get better people willing to take the job more seriously.
7) Get rid of the loads sitting in the corner playing with their phones. You know who they are!
8) Have the extremely well paid hospital administrator devote one hour per week to personally interviewing a few random patients every week to see if changes need to be made.

^^ I know about those annoying IV alarms. This hospital I’m familiar with have given their nurses their own hospital cellphones so wherever they are while on duty they can be reached quickly and directly.

By having a 24/7 non emergency department for minor illnesses. So that life threatening cases get seen first.

I refuse to be in a semi-private hospital room. It’s 2018 and no one should be treated with such disrespect to be stuck in a room with another person. I was on a crusade, of sorts, here in my county about this very thing. As of now two of four hospitals are 100% on private patient accommodations. My favorite hospital here still has semi-private rooms on their general (not ortho) surgery floor but has plans to transform when they renovate their last two floors. I don’t mean to take credit; I’m saying I’m not alone in demanding private accommodations, including private bath/shower.

@RedDeerGuy1 :: I don’t see the connect between that. Ideally you would get bumped up in the queue if you had a heart attack compared to the guy that fell off the ladder.

At least that is how it works here. And I am in the United States of shit healthcare.

I think you might be saying you want a 24 hour place to go for minor stuff and not have to wait. Which is reasonable. We have urgent care which is that middle tier. But you still have to spend 45 minutes sorting out your insurance shit.

I was just there .. Maybe you saw my comment about my HIV test a while ago. That was Urgent Care.

NOT JOKING ABOUT THIS…

So after getting my insurance shit squared away I was sitting in the lobby with my mom. Just waiting to be called in. We were the only people. 8AM sat morning.

Two women run in and one is obviously is serous fucking pain being guided in. She got bleach in her eyes and basically needed her eyes flushed. She was screaming. The lady at the counter was trying to get insurance info and everyone was screaming.

Keep in mind the urgent care I was at was in a industrial part of town. So bleach might not have been Clorox. But a industrial grade.

I love my mom.. She yelled, “You fucking cunt, flush her eyes”. And doctors started running out and helped her.

It is absurd. Urgent Care.. On a empty Saturday morning thought “insurance” before “help the injured”.

THE single biggest problem I have seen, is nurses on the Internet. Shopping, or doing stuff on Facebook. The last few times I’ve visited someone in the ICU, the nurses are all glued to computer screens, and are obviously distracted. When I worked as an EMT with animals, we would have been terminated, if some owner saw us doing that. It’s SUPER disrespectful, and it infuriates me that I couldn’t do it while making $15/hr, but these nurses making over twice that are. I can only imagine that patients must die all the time, and nobody notices for a while… That’s real professional. And an extra slap in the face come bill time.

Socialize medicine. Don’t make a person’s care or consideration based on if they have medical insurance or not. Too many people have lost everything and are living on the street because of medical expenses.

@LuckyGuy Reduce infections would be nice. Except antibiotic resistant infections are going to become more numerous, not less. Someday, and maybe someday soon, hospitals will be what they were many years ago: a place to die.

@kritiper I was thinking along the lines of some form of high power UV-C radiation that flashes the doorway or floors, or air. when it senses no one is there.

Lots of potentially harmful bacteria is always prevalent on our epidermis. Antiseptics, and cleaning procedures for surgery sites and instruments has cone a long way. But antibiotics are increasingly ineffective.

Edit. “Has ‘come’ a long way.”...