73 People Share Insider Information About Hospitals That May Just Freak You Out

Doctor here, everyone is guessing. There’s no such thing as truth, it’s just our best guess as to what’s happening.

The number of [medicine] resistant hospital acquired infections.

The_Erlenmeyer_Flask:

Yeah.. my mom's cousin's daughter got one. She was in remission from leukemia but she was told that there was a chance she would get one if she came to the hospital. She eventually [passed away] from complications of it.

Your care is often dictated by hospital administrators more than physicians.

How much quality of care has eroded because of anti-intellectualism.

Being compassionate for patients doesn't equal clinical outcomes. The "most caring" physicians can often be very poor performers clinically whereas some of the "greedy" physicians I would vastly prefer to take care of me knowing their outcomes.

How dark the humor is and for good reason.

I scrolled through almost fifty comments and was surprised I didn't see it...tuberculosis! The amount of times I've dealt with active tuberculosis patients is insanely higher than I expected. It's unfortunately pretty common among the unhoused community, which is prominent in my neck of the woods. Our community hospital only has two negative pressure rooms for tuberculosis and they are always (yes, ALWAYS) full...if there's another tuberculosis patient, we throw a mask on them until we can move them into a TB room and hope for the best.

Edited for location (because I'm close minded and don't realize how large reddit is): I'm in the Midwest, USA.

Honestly the amount of gossip people talk about patients can just be too much. I understand the job is hard and sometimes you have to make light of it but just remember they are people having the worst time of their lives right now.

It's called the 'practice' of medicine for a reason. Frequently providers are making decisions based on past experiences, assessment, and the vibes of the day, with an occasional spin through the guidelines and research depending on the commitment of the provider in question.

ETA: As a nurse practitioner, if the patient insists on seeing the physician as they want "only the best" I happily do not let the door hit me on the way out of the room. My attending physician is Rain Man level when it comes to medicine, but he ain't got the time to listen to what you are saying. If you stay on my service you get my people skills and his brain - but I'm not going to take the time to disabuse you of your bias, I've plenty of other patients who want my expertise.

I’m a medical device rep and the casual nature of anesthesiologists is sort of hilarious to me. I’ve seen one eating potato chips during a surgery and another addressing her Christmas cards. To be fair, the job is largely very boring and it’s probably very difficult to stay awake sometimes. I was in an OR the other day where I watched the scrub nurse nod off several times.

Not a nurse or a doctor, but once upon a time I was a medical cleaner in a hospital. The equipment like IVs and food pumps are not cleaned well. Routinely, devices would stop working because of this. I actually got in trouble for taking the time to clean them properly. The number of times I removed a battery from an IV and found caked in blood from transfusions would make you never want to stop in a hospital again. And it's not hard to clean these things. The techs are just lazy.

There’s a morgue in the basement and it’s never empty and always full of people of all ages 24/7. Fun fact the largest meeting room shares its back wall with the morgue. It’s said that meeting room projector and lights turn on and chairs are always moved around when nobody is there. Security claims to have footage.

I regularly have to wipe blood smears off off “clean” hospital beds because the cleaning staff isn’t thorough about the stirrups.

The washcloth they give you has cleaned someone’s [feces] and has mopped up vomit on the floor.

Not a doctor or nurse but I worked at a hospital in the purchasing dept for YEARS!! The mark-up on stuff is utterly bonkers. There’s a formula that gets used to calculate how much to charge patients, and it was something like x2.6 and x1.6+4.

July/August is the worst time to get sick.

New fellows and residents. It’s a rough transition because you have to learn a new system while adjusting to new responsibilities.

How dangerous some docs are.

A lot of them self medicate.

Ex was an ER doc. He was sober at work but used an alarming amount of (legal) substances the rest of the time. Didn’t really instill a lot of confidence. It was part of being extremely self-absorbed and having no heathy coping skills. Didn’t last very long.

Prior to long surgeries, patients often require a urinary catheter. This helps monitor fluid balance but also makes it easier to manoeuvre inside the abdomen. In order to do this, once you’re anaesthetised, we have to spread your legs, expose your genitals, (find your urethra) and insert the catheter through it. As a student it was initially quite shocking how lackadaisical people are with patient’s modesty. If there was a delay in catheterising the patient, there would often be nil attempt to cover them, as they wait in the frog leg position. There’s often up to 10 different people who are coming in and out of the theatre to do various jobs.

I’m much more immune to it now.. however I still think patients would be horrified to know they’ve just been left exposed for 10+ min with their legs spread, to anyone in the vicinity. If I’m doing it, I always attempt to maintain their modesty as best I can.

Definitely better than the non-consensual female pelvic exams that used to be done whilst patients were under. Thankfully before my time.

The PA or NP that sees you is not “just as good as a doctor”. Your physician has a literally sub-cellular understanding of what’s going on in your body.

PA programs are two year masters level programs and the education is based on a medical school model. But it’s not medical school, and the required hours of training are considerably less than those of a physician.

NPs were conceived as experienced nurses who have spent years at the bedside before deciding to “level up”. That’s usually not the case anymore. There are almost no barriers to entry for NP schools beyond a BSN and a nursing license.

It’s evolved this way in large part thanks to hospitals looking for cheaper alternatives to physicians (they are justifiably paid more) and for profit schools (some if not most entirely online) who’s priority is maximizing tuition dollars.

Your nurse practitioner in some cases may have never worked at the bedside as a nurse, just gone straight to NP as a new grad with a bachelor’s in nursing. And suddenly they’re supposed to be qualified to diagnose and treat.

I’m an RN in an urban trauma/teaching hospital and am considered by nature of my position to be one of the top bedside nurses in the facility.

I’ve been doing this for almost 2 decades and I genuinely feel that I don’t know enough to practice above the level of an RN. You’d be shocked how often NPs ask me for advice.

I definitely know what I’m doing, but I don’t have the depth of understanding about why I’m doing it than your physician does.

My brother is a plumber on the maintenance staff at a major Canadian hospital. The boilers are a ticking time bomb. Routine maintenance is pushed off to save money. Operating rooms are regularly closed due to water and sewage leaks. The hospital should have been gutted in stages and updated over the last 20+ years, but it never was. Instead, stuff is left to rot and then replaced when it fails even if that causes massive service disruptions or health hazards.

He does the best he can but he's not in charge and the maintenance leadership is more interested in playing political union games and covering their own asses than admitting to problems and getting stuff fixed. My brother says it's very much like how one of older relatives described communism in Soviet Russia; everyone reports to their superior that everything is fine so they don't look bad and that's how it goes up the chain. Senior leadership does essentially the same when reporting to the government and the cycle of neglect continues.

Statistically shown that nurse practitioners and PAs over test and over image patients. You may be getting lab tests or CT scans that are unnecessary.