Sunday, November 1, 2015

Too Many Cooks

There are too many cooks in the health care kitchen  This article is also from Dr. Kevin's blog.  This is something which I have previously mentioned in a slightly different context.

I object to all the extraneous people costing patient money.  There is no end to people populating medical entities all doing minor variations of the same job.  Do we need to pay all those people a lavish salary?  My contention is NO.

Do we need 40 or so different people roaming around and questioning us like a team of homicide investigators?  I don't think so.

Do we need a different diagnosis from myriad people?  Is it a game of 20 questions and we get to pick which diagnosis we wish to have?  Of course not, the patient's job is to endure it all and then pay up.  It's scandalous.

I got around it by having a patient advocate.  One more person involved in my care, right?  lol.  The difference is that the patient advocate was MY employee.  Her job was to make sure that the HOSPITAL workers remembered their place.  Her job was to make sure that I was treated like a human being, not a slab of meat, there to be used for profit.

An Anesthesiologist Explains Things

I came across this article in one of my emails from Dr. Kevin.  Will your anesthesiologist leave the OR? Patients deserve to know.  Every patient needs to know who will be in charge of their anesthesia.  It is our RIGHT under the law.  This anesthesiologist agrees with me.

Know that a routine procedure featuring nothing more than "sedation" (amnesia) can kill you.  So for some minor detail, your anesthesia can kill you.  I would like to be able to CONTRACT with an anesthesia provider directly.  I would like to be able to demand a video of my entire time in the OR.  That way substitutions could be ascertained.  To this day I'm not really sure that the surgeon I contracted with actually performed my surgery.  It was so poorly done, it would surprise me if the PA didn't do it.  The PA was literally listed on the hospital records as my surgeon.  HE is the person I saw prior to surgery, not my doctor.  I had no clue who he was.  The NURSE who performed my botched anesthesia did NOT reveal that he was 1) a nurse and 2) was going to perform my anesthesia and 3) had every intention of defying my wishes and doing whatever he damned well pleased regardless of what *I* said or gave permission for.

If it hadn't been for the fraudulent "anesthesiologist" I wouldn't have had my experience and wouldn't be here.  I had an absolute RIGHT to dictate WHAT care I was to receive and by WHOM.  Things need to change.

This anesthesiologist is one the right track.  However one needs to read the comments.  Once again what appears to be a crna jumps into the fray with their little self serving "moniker" featuring a drug name to let everybody know they work in anesthesia.  Do they realize that Dr. Kevin is widely read by the general public, especially those of us who have been treated badly by medical people?