Hiking & Hospitals: "Like a Box of Chocolates..."

A chance encounter on the Trail
in Pennsylvania

Nick & Jess at Springer Mountain
outside Atlanta, starting their 2,149-mile hike.

"...you never know what you're gonna get." 
        --Forrest Gump
                                                
In March 2012, our oldest kids, Nick and Jess, embarked

The stuff that went into Nick's pack

on a 2,149-mile through-hike of the Appalachian Trail.  Nick had spent months researching how to have the best Trail experience. With painstaking attention, he identified and assembled just the right tools to handle rain, blisters, navigation, food, first aid, cold, heat, and the occasional bear or rattlesnake. Thankfully, hiking the AT is a pretty safe undertaking. A death on the Trail is rare enough to be big news. No doubt one reason is that most hikers follow the Boy Scout motto: “be prepared.”

In hospitals, nearly three hundred people die every day from infections they didn’t come in with (including my father, in 2006). Thousands more die from medical error. So here's the question: before entering the hospital environment, what kind of preparation would you do? What tools would you bring?

"Come on," you say, "I'm the patient. That's not my job." True. But we wear seat belts in planes, and life vests on boats. Because things happen. It's the same in hospitals. Only worse.

The people who provide us with health care have an arsenal of "tools" proven to prevent these deaths, like being faithful about using good hand hygiene, checklists and contact precautions (to guard against the spread on infection). But they don't always use them. Why? Sometimes our caregivers are busy. Or they forget. The real problem? Pretending that human beings can practice medicine without mistake. They can't...no more than a pilot can be expected to remember every pre-flight detail without a checklist, or an Olympic gymnast can stick the landing every single time. Perpetuating the myth of perfection in medical care--defined as not doing the stuff we know works--is what one reporter described to me as "willful ignorance". 

Last week I was at a meeting involving the federal Partnership for Patients in Washington, DC. The room was filled with folks from best-intentioned hospital groups and other stakeholders who'd signed on to spearhead innovation in "patient-centered care". One at a time, they took the podium to report their successes (impressive) and challenges (substantial). They spoke of "tool kits" nurses and doctors use that ensure optimum care, and "bundles" (practices combined with tools, like those for proper IV insertion). These tools and bundles standardize routine tasks, and reduce variables that can make patient care unsafe. At the end, I couldn't help but ask "where's the "bundle" and "toolkit" for patients to use when they're stuck in that bed? Where is the tip list of how their own behaviors can impact their care? Where's the education that tells them not to touch their mouth with unclean hands, because that's one way they can get a C.diff infection? Where's the hand cleaner at the bedside? The notepad and pen for when the doctor explains test results?"

Susan Frampton of the The Planetree Hospital system stepped right up. (If you've never heard of Plantree hospitals, think beautiful, healing environments where the patient and family are also the core of a team.) Susan pointed out that there are lots of tips and lists available to patients and providers free on their website. Then a woman from The Leapfrog Group (a big health care quality consultancy) came up to me and told me Leapfrog has a bunch of packets with hand sanitizer, notepads and pens just waiting for distribution. They're not quite sure how to get them to patients. (I'll be following up and will let you know how to get them).

The bed table holds your personal "world" in the hospital.
What tools should you have with you?

Meantime what's a patient to do TODAY? 

Here's a radical thought: it's time for us patients to step up. In addition to researching your own medical condition or diagnosis (do I even have to mention that?), read up on hospital-acquired infections and medical harm. Ask if the tools mentioned above (hand cleaner at your bedside, notepad and pen, handouts about infection risk, etc.) are provided in your hospital or nursing home. They are? Yay! If they're not, well, as in any business, if customers request an item often enough, it may just start appearing. Until that happens, bring the stuff yourself.  Make sure the patient you care about has access to these items (that they don't end up in her water basin, moved across the room). Make sure you have your cell phone and charger with you AND an extension cord. Don't share magazines and books with other patients--and don't touch theirs--unless they've been thoroughly wiped down (dangerous germs linger on these surfaces).  Be vigilant about making sure the bed table doesn't get rolled away from you, because everything precious to you could get moved out of reach in an instant. Don't leave any personal item on the dinner tray. Many patients find that's how their stuff ends up thrown away in the kitchen trash. 

August 3, 2012
2,100+ miles later, Nick reaches Mt. Katahdin in Maine
(Jess is a few weeks behind, hiking with friends).

Will this solve every problem in the hospital? Not by a long shot. But it gives you as a patient a role to play in your care, and a degree of control in a place where too often you have so little. It will bring your eyes, ears and voice into the equation. It might just make things safer for all patients in the long run. 

Even in state-of-the-art hospitals, with the best caregivers, "you never know what you're gonna get". Why leave things to chance? As my kids learned trudging through snow, swamps, lightning and downpours, bad drinking water and tangled lines, the right tool at the right time can make a big difference.