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

Some hospitals call and give a “30 min heads up” from the ER when getting an admission. No report. If you’re busy during those 30 mins (always) you don’t have time to look up the incoming patient so you get a person dumped into a room you’re responsible for and know NOTHING about them. The bed is still warm from the last discharge. They’re more concerned with putting bodies in beds than the safety of their nurses and patients. Reason 26374902 I no longer work bedside.

How often Hospitalists are pressured to discharge patients asap regardless of safety due to pressure from insurance companies/hospitals and the Hospitalists in turn pressure specialists regardless if proper work up and treatment have occurred. Never go to insurance owned private hospitals.

Hospital employees have to wash their hands. Patients and visitors don’t. Any given door handle, elevator button, or lobby chair could have been touched by someone with any variety of body fluids, bacteria, or critters on their person just before you got there.

Within a few minutes of talking to you we decide if we are going to do the bare minimum or go the extra mile.

In OB a lot of care is guided by the fear of litigation, and personal preference over what patients want or sometimes what we know of would medically be best.

Morgue usually close to kitchen. Uses same cooling system.

There were special code words for if the elevator broke at the children's hospital. As in, if the elevator broke with no patients it was one colour, if there was a child patient in the elevator it was another.

Some hospital labs are run by high school grads with zero knowledge of the field. Put in front of sophisticated equipment, without the understanding of basic clinical chemistry, incapable of deciphering the difference between erroneous results and true values. Unable to preform high-complexity testing, limiting your access to blood products. Left alone, without support, just hoping for a quiet night shift.

*Not applicable to most hospitals. Speaking for the rural hospitals in my area.*.

Providers copy/paste all the time without doing new assessments. So many times I run into people documenting they did assessments when they maybe stuck their head in the door.

I was recently a patient at my hospital and while the overall treatment was great, of the three nurses, only one did a physical assessment while all three charted an assessment.

Read the doctor's notes after you have a clinic visit or procedure for accuracy. Also, a doctor I work with uses a template that pulls in information from pt's history. We'll get complaints about wrong things, but really this was historical data documted sometimes years before. It's much easier to correct if you can catch it soon.

A lot of physicians who have “great bedside manner,” that’s literally all they have. No clinical skills. No critical thinking. They’re incompetent and it makes them not confident and awful towards other staff.

The draped “catering appearance” table wheeled down the halls with the deceased “inside” and the top covered with a white table cloth.

If the nurse or phlebotomists comes to get another bloid sample, they either forgot to send the first one within the allotted time, didn't label it, or the hospital ate it. Rarely does the lab lose samples. We have strict controls on that. But before it gets to us, it's the wild west and anything could happen.

Or it's hemolized.

Also, the person in the lab handling your blood and telling doctors their patient is about to have a heart attack? They make minimum wage. Sure, there's supposedly an educated tech around somewhere, but they are trying to fix 20 yo equipment that has been discontinued and is vital to the operation of the hospital.

All the nurses and techs believe in Astrology, are involved in an MLM, and aren't vaccinated. You can't throw a rock without hitting someone's chakra crystal.

I hate healthcare. The whole industry is being held together by crotchety old champs that are waiting out retirement and like 4 hard workers. The other 90% are here because they heard it's good money and were lied to.

CRCST here. All the instruments used on you have probably been used on countless other patients before, maybe even that same day. And they are disassembled, cleaned, reassembled, and sterilized by people who usually have had no formal training (I have, however).