Hospital Survival Guide: The Patient Handbook to Getting Better and Getting Out

by David Sherer MD

Overview

WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE AN OPERATION IN JULY AND OTHER LIFESAVING ADVICE!

"This book offers practical advice about how to keep yourself free from harm and error in hospitals, and how to assert yourself in cases such as getting stuck with a bad roommate or a rude doctor. Includes chapters on taking children to the hospital and how to be prepared before an emergency." — The Wall Street Journal

Hospital Survival Guide: The Patient Handbook to Getting Better and Getting Out is the essential patient handbook to ensure that you and your family emerge from hospital visits healthier than before checking-in and without having to endure excessive stays, pain or indignities. Includes practical tips, warnings and surprising information you doctor might not tell you, such as the fact that July, when the new interns start, is the most dangerous month to have a procedure done at a teaching hospital; EMLA anesthetic cream can be requested to be used on children’s skin, allowing for less painful I.V. starts; and washing off all iodine-based antiseptics thoroughly after surgery can prevent chemical burns. Proven tips for reducing hospital bills are also presented.

Dr Sherer will teach you how to:

• Find the Best Hospital for Your Condition
• Demand & Receive the Best Care
• Avoid Unnecessary Pain & Complications
• Protect Your Health from Human Error
• Navigate Emergency Room Care
• Educate Yourself on Your Condition & Your Rights
• Protect Your Financial Health & Reduce Your Bills
• Choose Between Bundling Services Versus “Fee for Service” – Pricing/Pros & Cons
• Work the System to Get What You Need
• Maximize New and Innovative Ways to Use the Internet for Self-Education
• Deal with the Impact of Pandemic Emergencies, Natural Disasters and the Opioid Crisis on Your Care
• Learn More about Artificial Intelligence, Robotic surgery and Using Big Data
• Decide if “Medicare for All” is Feasible and the Social Determinants on the Allocation of Healthcare
• And Much Much More!

"I recommend this book for everyone, especially people who are undergoing their first operation in a hospital. Being aware of the services offered or not offered in the hospital and learning ways to reduce anxiety can be invaluable throughout one’s hospital stay. For health care providers, the Hospital Survival Guide offers excellent insight into many of the uncertainties that patients face as they enter into the unknown world of the hospital. Even though we hear the alarming statistics every day, the book is a powerful reminder of all of the mistakes that can be made in the course of care and what we all can do to reduce the likelihood of experiencing a medical error ourselves." — P&T® Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630061630
Publisher:	Humanix Books
Publication date:	08/11/2020
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David Sherer MD (Chevy Chase, MD) is an American physician, author and inventor. He is a member of Leading Physicians of the World, and a multitime winner of HealthTap’s leading anesthesiologists award. Dr. Sherer has retired from his clinical anesthesiology practice in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and now focuses on patient education, writing and patient advocacy; including as a medical and health video commentator for Bottom Line Inc.'s What Your Doctor Isn't Telling You columns and podcasts. He holds two US patents in the fields of critical care medicine and telecommunications. Appearing in all forms of media, Dr Sherer is a tireless advocate for hospitalized patients, and believes that individual responsibility, and not government intervention, is the key to improving the general health and wellbeing of all Americans.

https://bottomlineinc.com/source/david-sherer

The author lives & works in the Washington DC metro area.

Table of Contents

Foreword

How This Book Can Help Make Your Hospital Stay Safe and Comfortable ix

Chapter 1 Choosing the Best Hospital for Safety and Comfort 1

Chapter 2 You Need a Procedure or Surgery-Now What? 23

Chapter 3 The Pre-Surgery or Pre-procedural Interview What Every Patient Needs to Know 53

Chapter 4 Anesthesia and Pain Relief How to Make Sure Your Doctor Knows What It Takes to Keep You Out of Pain 87

Chapter 5 Taking Care of Business Insurance, Advance Healthcare Directives, Wills, and Other Matters 121

Chapter 6 Getting Ready to Go Packing and Other Practical Details 145

Chapter 7 In the Hospital 171

Chapter 8 When Your Child Has to Go to the Hospital 205

Chapter 9 When You Have No Time to Plan Advice for Emergency Room Patients 217

Chapter 10 Working the System to Get What You Need 251

Chapter 11 Leaving the Hospital … and Beyond 297

Chapter 12 Using the Hospital in Times of National Crisis 317

Afterword What Will the Future Look Like for Hospitals and Healthcare? 327

Appendix A Sample Medical Emergency ID Card 335

Appendix B Common Outpatient (Same Day) Procedures 337

Appendix C Hospital Jargon: A Sample Dialog (with Translation) 349

Appendix D Useful Websites 353

Appendix E Glossary of Hospital Terms 359

Index 377

Preface

Foreword to Hospital Survival Guide: The Patient Handbook to Getting Better and Getting Out

How This Book Can Help Make Your Hospital Stay Safe and Comfortable

The Hospital Survival Guide is presented with the benefit of examining and analyzing almost two decades of changes in hospital care, changes that in many ways reflect the evolution of healthcare in that same time period. Innumerable improvements in technology, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence and advances in robotic surgery, represent one large area of change. Another is the attention paid to pharmacy spending within hospitals, where up to 20% of a hospital’s operating budget goes. Still another is the staffing challenges, where a critical shortage of nurses and the coming doctor deficit in our country will have a huge impact on an aging and increasingly chronically ill population. Also, the way doctors and hospitals and doctors get paid is an area of continuing evolution; the old fee-for-service model is being replaced, in many instances, by “bundling” and other payment systems that rely on meeting certain predetermined performance metrics.

Some of these changes will have a direct impact on you and the experience you have in the hospital. Others will be less so. But I will present them nonetheless to give you a better understanding of the trends and direction that healthcare and, in particular, hospital care, is heading.

But none of that has changed the real intention behind this book: to help you the patient endure what is often a stressful and unpleasant experience. After all, no one I’ve ever met truly wants to have anything to do with hospitals.

To determine what information to put in this book, I looked back at a lifetime of exposure to medical issues and nearly forty years of my own interaction with patients. By “lifetime” I mean the years before medical school, when I learned about illness, hospitals and sickness-induced human suffering from my father, a doctor, and my mother, a former operating room nurse. When I was about 7 years old, I would go on rounds with my dad, who practiced medicine up until the last year of his life at age 87. For 57 years my dad had been a physician – diagnosing, healing and at times even suffering with his patients. Through these experiences, I witnessed how scared and uncomfortable people could be because they were ill and in the hospital. All of that made a strong impression upon me. But it was another important person in my young life who fueled my desire to help patients feel safer and more comfortable —my late sister. Her frequent complications from severe diabetes made her a revolving-door hospital patient for much of her all-too-brief life.

In short, the driving impetus behind this book emanates from a broad range of personal relationships and personal experiences, forces within me that exist even after I retired from clinical medicine in 2019. There was no triggering incident, no particular horror story, that’s behind it. My family background and the daily experience I had as a doctor seeing patients who were scared and uncomfortable were sufficient motivation for me, through this book, to make the whole patient experience better. Patients, perhaps even more than when this book first appeared in 2003, still desperately want to regain some control over their lives.

As an anesthesiologist, I commonly saw patients at the height of their confusion and vulnerability. My presence reminded them that surgery was imminent, and that realization lead them to ask as many questions as they could before being hurried off to surgery. The hospital gown that leaves private parts exposed and that hideous “shower cap” to cover your hair are only the external trappings the control you relinquish. All of a sudden you realize: “This is for real—I’m going to be unconscious in a room full of strangers, gadgets and very sharp implements.” Just then you crave the details of your impending experience and wish you knew if anything can be done to make it better.

Every day before I administered anesthesia, I heard a stream of “what ifs?” and “then whats?”. That got me thinking that most of the questions I got at this point in the process ought to have been answered far earlier. The answers and reassurances people were seeking should have come from the patients’ own primary care physician, surgeon, specialist, the nursing staff or even, in some cases, the health insurance plan or company. Because I may not have had the time to give the needed answers, the patient ended up going into surgery feeling more anxious than ever.

That shouldn’t happen. I firmly believe patients have a right to know, if they desire, salient details concerning what was to be done to their bodies and what the recovery period was going to be like while in the hospital. This includes the long-term prospects for recovery as well. In this book you will find out how to get that information from the right source and at the right time—as well as what to do if you receive unsatisfactory or unintelligible answers.

From the start to finish of your hospitalization, you have a right to expect that medical professionals will respect you and respond to your needs in a professional manner. There’s a flip side to your expectations, though. The hospital staff has a right to expect you to be open and honest about your condition and reasonable about the things you want done for your comfort. They’ll need you to be calm and cooperative, at least to the extent that you can manage it, while you are being poked and interrogated. They should understand that waking you up at four o’clock in the morning to check vital signs or draw blood will likely, and justifiably, make you frustrated and angry with the system. Hopefully you’ll realize that they’re not just waking you up out of a sadistic desire to deprive you of sleep, but because there is some clear medical purpose for doing so that can’t be postponed. (If, however, they are waking you for a reason that could well be postponed, this book will tell you how to get them to do it!)

To assist in making your hospital stay safe and comfortable, I will address the most frequently asked patient questions, plus many others you may not have thought of. I will alert you to potentially deadly medical errors and point out some of the small but annoying things about hospital care that you can learn to avoid, once you’ve been warned about them. I will also tell you stories of real people and their experiences (although I have changed names and other identifying information for those individuals who requested anonymity). All in all, this book will be your insider’s guide to make the hospital system work for you, so that you can endure the safest and most comfortable hospital stay possible.

Please carry this book with you if you have to go to the hospital or, if you are unable to care for yourself or understand the material presented, have a patient advocate carry it for you. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a spouse, relative, trusted friend or other person ready to act in that capacity, but it is so important, if at all possible, to find such a person to assist you. Armed with this book and their assistance, patients will be telling, I trust, less nightmare-like stories (replete with medical mishaps and personal indignations) and more tales of comprehension, mutual cooperation and empowerment.

David Sherer, MD

April 2020

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Hospital Survival Guide by Doctor David Sherer:

"This book offers practical advice about how to keep yourself free from harm and error in hospitals, and how to assert yourself in cases such as getting stuck with a bad roommate or a rude doctor. Includes chapters on taking children to the hospital and how to be prepared before an emergency." — The Wall Street Journal

"Dr. Sherer...addresses what to expect and ask for..." — The New York Times

"In his "Survival Guide," (Dr Sherer) maintains that it's patients, not doctors, who are in the best position to make many decisions affecting their health care." — The Washington Post

"Offers Practical Tips for Making Hospital Stays Less Traumatic for Patients." — P&T® Journal

"Dr. David Sherer’s Hospital Survival Guide is an insightful and easy-to-read book on making a hospital stay as safe and relaxed as possible... describe(s) steps patients can take to minimize the risk of medical errors during their hospital stay. The author include(s) more than 100 tips for maximizing the hospital experience; Contains short chapters that focus on key questions that all readers would want answered, such as how to select the appropriate hospital when surgery must be performed, how to go about choosing the surgeon, which documents are needed, and how to get the most benefit from the hospital stay." — P&T® Journal

"I recommend this book for everyone, especially people who are undergoing their first operation in a hospital. Being aware of the services offered or not offered in the hospital and learning ways to reduce anxiety can be invaluable throughout one’s hospital stay. For health care providers, the Hospital Survival Guide offers excellent insight into many of the uncertainties that patients face as they enter into the unknown world of the hospital. Even though we hear the alarming statistics every day, the book is a powerful reminder of all of the mistakes that can be made in the course of care and what we all can do to reduce the likelihood of experiencing a medical error ourselves." — P&T® Journal

"Dr. Sherer's contribution to navigating the hospital maze emphasizes surgical hospitalizations... He notes that July, when the new interns start, is the most dangerous month to have a procedure done at a teaching hospital. He also presents proven tips for reducing hospital bills and offers a range of suggestions for making hospital stays safer and more pleasant." — ElderLawAnswers.com

From the Publisher