Monday night we were assigned a nurse who doesn't work on this unit, and she managed, through more than half a dozen nursing mistakes in one 12 hour shift, to keep both me and Linda awake all night. Fortunately, none of her mistakes caused Linda any injury. I reviewed everything with the charge nurse who came on at the beginning of Tuesday's day shift, and asked that this particular person not ever be reassigned to Linda. The charge nurse agreed, and so I guess that puts an end to these issues. All we lost was a good night's sleep.
Tuesday Linda was once again sitting up at the side of her bed, and then again for a couple hours in the cardiac chair. The respiratory and physical therapy people are doing everything they can, little by little, to build up Linda's muscle strength and get her breathing on her own. The tube feedings are now causing Linda some diarrhea, so they are not increasing the feeding rate at the moment, and they are giving her Imodium for the diarrhea. It seems to be getting things under better control.
Linda smiles when she recognizes the therapists who keep coming back to work with her day after day, and even though they put her through some difficult work and painful maneuvers each time she sees them, she cooperates and understands that they are doing what is needed to help her get back on her feet. Progress is slow but apparently pretty steady.
Tuesday we learned from the every 30 day insurance interview that, in spite of the fact I brought 10 sets of color photocopies of both our Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance cards with us when we came directly here from Northwestern, and personally handed them to the insurance, admitting and finance people when Linda was admitted, together with detailed descriptions of how BC/BS should be billed, the hospital staff assumed it was Indiana BC/BS [Anthem] rather than BC/BS of Illinois as clearly set out on the insurance cards. They have been billing everything incorrectly from the beginning!! I haven't been home much to pick up mail for the obvious reason, but based on these phone discussions I now believe there must be balance bills from IU Hospital in the mailbox claiming we owe hundreds of thousands of dollars we don't actually owe. Given our past experience at Loyola and Northwestern hospitals with exactly this sort of issue, the bills are probably already electronically transferred to collection agencies, and pasted all over both our credit reports. I went ballistic at the billing woman when I came to understand that it may take more than a year for us to sort out the resulting damage to our respective credit from this error on their part.
After the initial repercussions of this sank in, one of the doctors rounding did check his blackberry to see what was going on. He would only tell me that "there are e-mails flying all over the hospital about this problem." Not sure that will help any. Later Tuesday afternoon another of the neurology attending physicians came by to see Linda for himself, unable to believe the glowing reports of his colleagues regarding Linda's recovery thus far. He told me what he sees is nothing short of miraculous, and he believes her progress will continue. He stopped short of predicting a full recovery, though. He did say he wants to present Linda's case at the monthly morbidity and mortality conference, as neurology so rarely has any good news to bring to those meetings.
I have been asking everyone here, from charge nurses to patient representatives to the chaplain to the customer service representative to Dr. Tector to arrange a meeting with Clarian [parent company] risk management for an informal conversation about the five incidents where nurses or doctors nearly killed Linda. They all say they will set it up, yet for a month nothing has happened. So, I googled the name of the risk management person at Clarian's Indianapolis home office, and wrote him a three page e-mail setting out each incident and asking him if he wanted an amicable, prompt, confidential resolution of the situation rather than protracted litigation and public exposure. I only scanned the signed letter and E-mailed it to him at 7 p.m. Tuesday, so no answer yet. I'll follow up with a telephone call to him sometime after 9 this morning. I despair of any efficiency in the hospital's response.
That's all the news for now. Today should be interesting at least from an insurance and legal viewpoint.
No comments:
Post a Comment