Institution-specific Whinging
signout | February 26, 2007For weeks, our emergency department (ED) has been "red," meaning that--theoretically, anyway--it is no longer accepting patients. Of course, sick people who come to the door are not turned away. Ambulances, however, are instructed to take patients not requiring high-level trauma services to other emergency departments in the city, and our triage staff works extra hard to redirect people who don't really need emergency care.
The other day, I walked into the main charting area of the ED and smelled pizza. This worried me, as food odors in the emergency department are, more often than not, early…
signout | February 15, 2007Oh, that hospital.
Yesterday was SO romantic. The hospital woke me up early with a big, sloppy kiss and had me all packed off to work by 6:00 a.m. An hour later, it gave me a code--a guy with a busted heart chamber. Get it? A heart chamber? On Valentine's Day? So thematically appropriate! I did chest compressions for days after he was dead because the cardiologists wanted to practice doing pericardial windows. It's a good thing the hospital prefers its ladies musky.
I discharged two patients to nursing homes before noon (nuts to those sad, old single people, ha ha!), and after my upper level…
signout | September 24, 2006This month, I'm rotating through a small community hospital that is affiliated with the academic center where my residency program is based. For residencies based in well-staffed, well-resourced academic centers, the point of having their residents rotate through a community hospital is to expose them to the real world of medicine. A significant proportion of the hospitals in this country are community hospitals, and because these facilities have little to none of their budget devoted toward research, they often have far fewer specialty services and facilities than academic hospitals do.
This…