Lost a close relative last night. She was having a chronic illness for over a year and this tweet is about the treatment she received at a leading, relatively new private hospital in Chennai. She went to hospital for a procedure and was to have been discharged 1 day later.
Instead she developed one complication after another. In the elderly such things can happen but it was the approach of the doctors that was disheartening.When she was in the ICU they brief the family once a day. Over 10 days we hardly ever got to speak to the same doctor twice .
Each doctor would give a completely different version of her condition, down to giving different values of lab reports. The version given by attending nurse would contradict what doctors said. For eg. a doctor said her Creatinine was 4.3 and they were worried about that.
When I pointed out the earlier doc had said her Creatinine was fine she checked the case sheet and said she got it wrong and it was for some other patient. Such incidents were unnerving. There were major errors in diagnosis too and attempts to ask for tests were dismissed
A doc wd say BP was fine without meds. Call the ICU in 1/2 hr & attending nurse wd say she was on 2 drugs to maintain BP. Day before yesterday on the update I was informed by another new senior doctor that she had improved well and wd be shifted to the room the next day
2 hours later another doctor called to say that she had been critical since the previous day and was deteriorating rapidly.This was completely contradictory to information given 2 hours earlier. To top it all they prevented anyone from going into ICU even once a day citing #Covid
only to inform that patient has to be tested for Covid again because a nurse who had treated her for 4 days had tested positive. I hv worked in Critical Care for years and I understand the problems doctors there face. But there needs to be at least ONE doctor in an ICU who knows
the entire patient history and progress. Obviously in an ICU, doctors work in shifts but there must be at least 1-2 Consultants who are senior and do just the working day shifts. This hospital did not seem to have any such docs. Or if they did they weren't doing the briefing.
At every stage we got the feeling that they were treating shift to shift and were never really trying to figure out what was going wrong. Various specialists came in and treated the organs of their specialty and blamed other organ systems for deterioration .
So the cardio blamed the Liver. The Liver team blamed the kidney, the nephro blamed Infection etc. So the organs they were in charge of were fine but patient was worsening and NO ONE was in charge of the the patient. In the end she passed away without a definitive diagnosis
besides her primary condition which should not hv caused her demise so soon as she was asymptomatic.This is possibly the condition in many ICU's in Corporate Hospitals in India. It needs to change. Clear communication and compassion are a must. End of rant
