Thursday, August 7, 2008

Nice Planning

I have spent the last couple of days at the new University Hospital and have come to realize that the designers of the building were retarded. The biggest example of this is the helicopter "access". The local news did a story on this recently, but I got a chance to see this marvel of modern engineering personally.

For some reason, the designers decided that this brand new hospital building didn't need a helipad on the roof. So they built one in the parking lot. Did they choose a parking lot next to the ER? Nope, they placed it across the street. This means that patients must be loaded into an ambulance and then driven about 100 yards. Did they not know they were building a hospital that would be taking care of critically injured people? What dumbass thought that an ER department at a "state of the art" facility didn't need a convenient helipad? Apparently it was someone who hadn't heard of these new fangled devices called "helicopters".

Only slightly less irritating is that this 4 year old hospital is already too small. After waiting in the ER to be moved to a regular room for 19 hours, I had to ask what the hold up was. I was told that it could take 30 to 40 hours to get a hospital bed. Apparently the rooms are always full, so ER patients are forced to sit in the crappy emergency beds for up to 2 days! There are already plans to add on another tower to the hospital. Apparently no one thought to take into account that this new location is in a very populated area, with no other hospital for miles.

If you couldn't tell, I spent about 36 hours in hell Monday thru Tuesday and I'm a tad irritated about it. I won't even go into the nursing day staff...

2 comments:

Roland Deschain said...

Oh, trust me man. The nursing staff is not just confined to that hospital. At Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, we ran into some seriously retarded staff members when my grandfather was dying. We actually told one nurse that if she returned to his room we would call CSPD and have her charged with assault and arrested. When you have to have a hospital administrator come down so you can explain to her that one of her nurses is practically abusing patients and you'll be turning her into a patient herself if you see her again...not a fun time.

We don't have hospitals anymore. We have insurance run warehouses. It's sad when my cat gets better care from his vet than I can get at a single frakking hospital in town...

Sangediver said...

No shit. With Lakota we got great care. I hadn't thought of it that way.

One more reason to come back as a dog ;)

My favorite moment was nagging the nurse to contact our OB doctor, over and over. When she finally did she came in to say, "I have your OB on the phone, what did you want to talk to her about?"

"Um, THE BABY?!?! Isn't that what OB doctors do? You stupid bitca."