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Comment by chasd00 | Hacker News Reader

this happens a lot. my stepfather was in the hospital, a nurse came in and gave him a shot of morphine and walked out. another nurse came in and before my mom could stop her gave him another dose. He coded from the overdose but pulled through.

my sister worked as an admin in some department at a hospital I can't remember. a patient coded and they did nothing because they were marked do not resuscitate but the patient came back on their own. Afterwards, the nurses found the patient was labeled incorrectly.

I've told my wife and mother (mom is an RN) that if any of our family go into the hospital they are not to be left alone.

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I've gone to visits with a partner with metastatic breast cancer, my father with colon cancer, and my mother with metastatic lung cancer.

It's incredibly useful to have two sets of ears listening to what the doctors are saying so that you can clarify what they said.

All too often we weren't given anything in writing except what I was doing myself. That's improved quite a bit but it's still amazing to me that people downplay the usefulness of electronic medical records and the printouts that you usually get.

This is why checklists have become are a huge thing in the medical field.

In your scenario, imagine if the first nurse had it drilled into her that she must tick a box on the patient checklist, which lies very visible next to the patient and is almost impossible to not notice, and you have a physical system that makes it difficult to commit mistakes

That sure would be nice.

I haven't had any problems of this scale, but my doctor can't even schedule a follow-up appointment 3 months in advance.

They can't even use a calendar, much less a checklist.

My pills are prescribed for 3 months and they always manage to hem and haw and almost miss the window as if the passage of time was a recent concept that their practice was unequipped to deal with.

On the other hand, every psychiatrist I've ever had, had no problem getting my anti-psychotics or anti-ADHD medications sent to the pharmacy inside of a day.

A lot of medical software is severely lacking, and general practitioners often operate solo practices where they operate by the doctor's preferences (which might make everyone else's life very difficult, such as the people who have to handle recurring appointments). I've been around some doctors that will do things like ban using the recurring appointments because when they double click the appointment it takes them to the "edit recurring appointment" page, not the "take patient notes page". So yes, their office may be literally unequipped to handle the passage of time because either their EHR system sucks, or the doctor is making everyone else's life hard.

Psychiatrists seem to operate out of groups more often (I see far fewer solo psychiatrists). Groups mean that you have to have EHR software that works well enough to transfer patients between doctors, and you have to have standards set up to where doctors can read patient histories from other doctors. Basically your EHR system needs to be functional, which has nice side effects like making scheduling and prescription refills work correctly.

Everyone in a hospital should have an advocate with them. My girlfried was going through treatment and one day they tried to give her a shot, insisting that she needed it. She is deatly allergic to most things. I pushed back, refusing the treatement. They were looking at the wrong chart.

Jesus christ man that is terrifying beyond belief. Glad your dad pulled through, hope he sued them and won.

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