As a safety net hospital, Denver Health serves “the poor, uninsured, mentally ill, pregnant teens, persons addicted to alcohol and other substances, victims of violence, the homeless and those with AIDS” — and that’s its own description.
Not exactly the crowd at a typical garden party.
As a Level I Trauma Center, Denver Health also handles the victims of car accidents, shootings, knifings and all manner of other unpleasant encounters.
So if someone discovers you on the floor of your home and summons paramedics, you’d just as soon be taken somewhere other than 777 Bannock St. in Denver, right?
Well, if so, you’d be misguided. Having spent upwards of 30 hours at Denver Health Medical Center during the past week to visit a stricken loved one, I can only marvel at the unfailing professionalism, patience and understanding of most — indeed, virtually all — of the staff I’ve encountered.
The fact that they allowed me to stay by her side during five or six hours in an emergency room, while doctors and nurses congregated around and worked their magic, was an eye-opener in itself.
Maybe this sort of welcome mat is thrown down in all hospital emergency rooms these days in an effort to humanize the practice of medicine and provide comfort for the afflicted. But if so, it’s hard to believe that any hospital could do a better job at making a layman feel at home.
Time after time, without prompting, someone would turn to me and describe what they were doing or were going to try next in response to the alarming data we followed on a monitor. Sometimes they asked me to step back — during the application of electric shocks, for example — but often I hovered at bedside, occasionally grabbing the patient’s hand and offering a banal (and unheard, I’m sure) assurance that all would be well in the end.
As if I had any idea.
Equally impressive was the doctors’ openness in discussing the best way to proceed, since their initial efforts did not seem to bear fruit. For all they knew, I might have been some litigation-prone grump eager to start finger-pointing if the patient’s condition headed south, while tucking every tidbit that might be portrayed as a false start into my memory bank.
Several hours into the ordeal — or at least it seemed that way — one of the paramedics who’d transported her stopped by to see how she was doing. That same fellow would find his way up to her room several days later to check on her condition again. You’d think I was making this up.
And the tab for this medical saga (which continues as I write, eight days on)? I gather it will be going to Medicare, the biggest single driver of growing federal spending. Yet I can’t say I gleaned any lessons in public policy from the experience.
To be sure, as the columnist Robert Samuelson recently noted, a new study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris suggests the major factors in U.S. health-care inflation are “steep prices and abundant provision of some expensive services.”
For example, Samuelson says MRI exams “were almost twice as common per 100,000 population as in the rest of the OECD.”
Who could doubt it? An MRI was ordered in this case, too, although I’d be the last person to second-guess its necessity. The abundant provision of expensive services — not one but two CAT scans, for example — seemed like a pretty good thing for a while.
Someday, I suspect, doctors and patients will face constraints on their choices as the country tries to steer clear of financial free-fall. But on this particular late afternoon in December, such predictions bore me. Sometimes you just want to salute a job well done, even if the final chapter isn’t quite in sight.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
