Hi, Carolyn. Love your weekly chats! Thanks for all you do! I have to have a (non-emergency but necessary) medical procedure (think a colonoscopy). The facility will not admit me for the procedure unless I am accompanied by someone who will be there for the duration of the procedure and drive me home. I cannot take a cab home, and I cannot arrange for someone to pick me up when I'm ready to go. I'm not married, I don't have kids or other family that could take me, and although I have good friends, none that I feel comfortable asking to take a day off work to sit in an office waiting room with me. So I've repeatedly had to delay the appointment. What do people like me do in this situation? I have a chronic medical condition, and I'm suddenly very depressed about the fact that I have to go through life wondering who is doing to take me to my various appointments. I realize that this is a silly logistical question, but it's really triggered some profound feelings of loneliness and fear, and I'd be interested in your thoughts. Thanks!This is actually a serious procedural problem in the medical system. The job of the medical system is to take care of you, so it's simply not appropriate for them to require you to bring someone to take care of you.
You arrive at the doctor's office capable of getting home yourself, so they should release you in a condition where you are capable of getting home yourself. Maybe they can achieve this by letting you rest in the recover room for longer, maybe by providing you with food and drink or additional medication - they're the medical professionals, they'd know how. To do anything else is simply a failure to care properly for patients. Policies like this should be prohibited.
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And you know what? Let's be bold and extend this rule beyond simple medical care. All aspects of life should be achievable by anyone without a support person, and if they aren't the relevant organizations should change their policies and practices. Driving schools should organize their standard courses so people can get fully licenced without having to find their own accompanying driver to practice with. Dresses should be designed so the wearer can put them on and do them up completely without help. The school system should be set up so students can be just as successful even if they don't have a supportive parent.
People who, for whatever reason, don't have a someone who is a fully competent adult who speaks the predominant local language and is able to drop everything to help them when needed are already at a disadvantage. Society and its institutions should be set up to mitigate this disadvantage, not reinforce it.
2 comments:
Wow, I never thought of this! You are absolutely right.
Both my partner and I have had procedures where we needed to pick up the other one and take them home. I never considered this was a privilege that not everyone has access to.
On the total opposite end of the spectrum, long ago I was one of many "care partners" to a friend undergoing chemotherapy for AIDS. This wing of the hospital was set up more like a hotel. Patients had their own rooms, which looked exactly like hotel rooms, with no medical equipment or medical people entering the room.
The care partner helped the patient get to the chemo area, then sat with them during the treatment, then helped them get back to their room. (I remember all the women with their head scarves, presumably cancer patients.)
My friend and a different friend of his had brainstormed all the people who might agree to be his care partners. The other friend called everyone and created a schedule of different friends covering different days of chemo.
The benefits of this system were supposed to be greater autonomy for the patient, and (I suppose) lower costs per patient, so more patients could be treated. But of course it was only available to people who had someone -- usually multiple someones -- who could serve as care partners.
My friend hugely preferred this over more conventional hospital stays. It was a very positive experience for me, too.
You know, that really sounds like it could be tweaked without too much difficulty into something that doesn't require patients to bring their own care partners.
For example, off the top of my head, do patients actually need someone to accompany them to and from the chemo area and sit with them during treatment? I'm not up on all the details of chemo so I could well be missing some nuance, but it seems like, at a minimum, they should be able to sit alone during the treatment if that's not something that needs immediate medical supervision. Some patients might be able to get from their room to the treatment area by themselves, depending on variables. And even if medical people don't as a rule enter the patients' rooms to give them treatment, surely it's better for a patient to be escorted back to their room by a medical person and then left alone to rest than for that patient not to be able to access the program because they can't wrangle enough support people of their own!
Also, this seems like work that could be done by volunteers. Many hospitals already have volunteer programs, with established recruitment mechanisms and coordinators whose whole job is to find and deploy volunteers. So why not use that existing structure to find people to escort patients from Point A to Point B rather than making patients come up with their own volunteers?
Actually, this should be its own blog post.
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