Thanks for the comments; you bring up good points and I was probably being a bit expansive.
When I was a medical student, I used to ask patients, just prior to discharge, what their hospitalization was for, what their primary diagnosis was, what's the follow-up, etc. I was absolutely disheartened at how few people had any clue whatsoever (though some were due to poor communication on our part). But then again, as a patient it's a ton of work to really be on top of your care. I've tried tagging along with family members who were hospitalized and even I had to press to follow everything.
I've never been hospitalized, so maybe I'm not able to understand the emotional impact of being in those huge, strange buildings on the other side of the white coats (which I refuse to wear anymore for a lot of reasons). I've been on prescription pain pills once, and quit after 2 days because they made me so sleepy; I preferred the pain. So I'm constantly struggled to really get inside the mindset of any patients who don't articulate their thoughts.
Yikes, don't know where I'm going with this. I'd like things to change, but have no idea where to start.
It pains me the HN approach to these kinds of problems: Hospitals aren't great, so therefore they're death camps. What's the recommendation then? Stay at home the next time something happens to your health? You'll fare better that way? "Read 3 books" about every procedure? Lots of my patients have poor medical literacy, are scared, and wouldn't care enough to read even if the first 2 factors were absent. I'd love it if everyone was an expert in his/her disease process, but that's like asking for zero highway accidents.
I look forward to the improvements we can make, including with systematic improvement of things we take for granted (the wonderful Pronovost study). But I feel like it's impossible to have a blogger-style discussion about these kinds of things without everyone being a know-it-all that doesn't actually provide anything in the way of solutions.
The OP problem is so beyond complicated that I'm not even sure how to approach the headline.
When I was a medical student, I used to ask patients, just prior to discharge, what their hospitalization was for, what their primary diagnosis was, what's the follow-up, etc. I was absolutely disheartened at how few people had any clue whatsoever (though some were due to poor communication on our part). But then again, as a patient it's a ton of work to really be on top of your care. I've tried tagging along with family members who were hospitalized and even I had to press to follow everything.
I've never been hospitalized, so maybe I'm not able to understand the emotional impact of being in those huge, strange buildings on the other side of the white coats (which I refuse to wear anymore for a lot of reasons). I've been on prescription pain pills once, and quit after 2 days because they made me so sleepy; I preferred the pain. So I'm constantly struggled to really get inside the mindset of any patients who don't articulate their thoughts.
Yikes, don't know where I'm going with this. I'd like things to change, but have no idea where to start.