Patient rights are under siege, as evidenced in a recent survey conducted by the National Institute for Patient Rights (NIPR). Our staff compiled the results based on responses from one-thousand randomly selected, former hospital patients who took part in the study.
In a series of postings to the NIPR blog, I will provide a summary of results from the study. The results of the survey show that, despite billions spent on advances in medical technology, patients and their families daily experience a widespread violation of patient rights “at the hospital bedside.”
Ironically, the widespread violation of patient rights by healthcare professionals may be a consequence of the success of the application of science to medicine.
Among those responding to essay questions, the following was a typical scenario. A hospital admits a loved one with “complications” (a medical euphemism for “we really don’t know all that’s going on here, but there are several organs involved”).
While the loved one rests stable in bed, a line of doctors and nurses seems to form at the door. One after another, doctors enter the room, make a few comments, then turn around and exit. Primary care physicians refer patients to specialists who rely on subspecialists. It seems like each separate organ has its own special doctor.
In the health care industry, this is commonly referred to as “component management,” which results from a focus on the treatment of individual organ systems in isolation from others.
It suffers from two shortcomings: (1) specialists and subspecialists tend to segregate organ systems at the expense of the whole patient; and (2) it is inefficient, because it inevitably leads to “episodic intervention” where if something happens, you see one specialist for a particular organ system; if something else happens, then you see another specialist or subspecialist, and so on.
Episodic intervention leads unavoidably to uncoordinated care that lacks continuity for the patient and for the patient’s family. Many individual decisions in patient treatment by numerous specialists and subspecialists entail a fragmented delivery system.
According to the findings of the NIPR study, this leads to the number one problem in contemporary healthcare delivery: miscommunication or a failure to communicate.
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