Health Care is Broken

Our health care system is sick and needs critical care.

But will there be enough doctors and nurses to provide the urgent care it so badly needs.

I’m talking about this … not because of any in depth research I’ve conducted but because of a loved one who survived the current system … which is saying a lot.

SUSAN 1:

“I spent a year going from urgent care to urgent care to doctor's offices, to CT scans, to express care to doctor's office. Again, trying to find out what was wrong with me and I was on antibiotics. Thank goodness, because I do believe the drug saved my life, but nobody got it.

Nobody figured out what was wrong with me. I was sort of passed off as having UTIs when in fact it didn't have anything to do with my bladder at all. What I had, didn't have anything to do with that, and nobody figured it out. Nobody tried to figure it out.”

Susan spent an entire year in the system before she got the help she needed. And too often she felt that she wasn’t being heard.

SUSAN 2:

“I think it was that people didn't look beyond the obvious. They didn't take time to look deeply enough in my chart and ask some questions. I had one doctor actually say, ‘you remind me of my mother. I don't think there's anything wrong with you, but I'll give you some antibiotics anyway. Do the urine test and see, but I don't think anything is wrong with you.’

But it was later discovered that there was a serious health problem that did need emergency care.

SUSAN 3:

“It turns out I did have an infection. There was something wrong with me, and I even pointed in my abdomen as to where it hurt, and he didn't even wanna go there. He didn't wanna touch it, he didn't wanna talk about it, and that is where the abscess was. That was the problem.”

A trip to the emergency room finally lead to the correct diagnosis and a surgeon who did care about her needs.

SUSAN 4

“Finally, the CT scan revealed that there was an abscess and that is what was causing the infections, and that I needed an operation, but it took almost a year for me to get the diagnosis that I needed.”

Doctors are very much aware of the problem. Staffing and lack of support staff are causing many to leave the profession early because of burn out. One took to social media recently to explain what is needed to solve the problem.

Doctor 1:

“We want to have input on staffing, how many patients we're caring for, and what our job description is. Before some executives in the C-suite tell us what we must do. We want the ability to call in a backup doctor. If we're drowning, we're more likely to make mistakes or have poor outcomes without such help. Because if things keep going as they are, there will be no good doctors or nurses left to care for patients, which could be our friends, our families, our neighbors, or heck, even us.”

93 percent of the Doctors and nurses of a huge local provider voted to strike soon if the problems aren’t fixed. They say patients need the care even if it means they have to put in overtime to provide it.

Doctor 2:

“My hospital doesn't pay me for that time, and it's actually not about the money. My hospital, CEO at Providence makes $11 million a year while we, doctors and providers are just trying to get by on bare bone staffing and increasing workloads.

And patients are beginning to see the result of an understaffed system.

SUSAN 5

“From a patient's point of view, I rarely saw a doctor. I saw nurse practitioners most of the time. Sometimes they were just interns. They weren't even nurse practitioners, which is one step up. I didn't always see a doctor, so that's part of the problem. They're trying to use the lower level staff people to diagnose, because I'm sure the lower level staff people don't make as much as a doctor.”

It’s becoming evident to both those who work in and those who use the heath care system that more staff with more time for the patient is needed to fix it.

But will health win out over wealth to make it work right for all of us?