What if it was your mother?

I have been reflecting this week about an incident that made it to the national news; a woman wearing a hospital gown was left by hospital personnel at a bus stop in our city. We don’t know all of the facts, but this has been reported not to be an isolated occurrence. Could this happen at GBMC?

Emergency departments are frequently under siege. I have been in healthcare for more than 30 years and through those years, I have seen how we frequently use the emergency department as the pathway of least resistance. Primary care office closed? Send the patient to the ED. Specialist unable or unwilling to deal with a problem in the moment? Send the patient to the ED. Hospital leaders not able to create a smooth system for admitting a stable patient to the hospital? Send the patient to the ED. No way to get an infusion done on the weekend? Send the patient to the ED. Mental health system is broken? Send the patient in crisis and his or her family to the ED. I have worked in the emergency department when it seemed that we were overwhelmed with many problems beyond our control. And of course when the emergency department is overcrowded, people wait and they get upset.

What if we assume for the sake of discussion that there is a patient for whom the emergency department has done its job of treating an acute problem? The staff believes it has done all it needs to do and the patient is not happy. The patient begins to act in a belligerent manner after being told that she is being discharged. Let’s also assume that the first reaction of the staff is to try and reason with the patient and calm her down. But what if the patient escalates her behavior and starts yelling and screaming and even threatening the staff? And what if this is the third angry patient of the evening who has gotten confrontational? Can you understand the urge of a physician, nurse, or security guard to have this patient leave the ED? Of course, you can.

And what if the patient in this not atypical situation was your mother? What should happen next? There is no perfect answer in this hypothetical situation, but of course, you want your mother treated with respect and kindness, even if she is out of control.

As the leader of the GBMC HealthCare System, it is my job to make sure that the ED staff members believe that we will not leave them on their own when they are confronted with problems beyond their ability to fix. They must also believe that people like me mean it when we say that everyone must be treated the way we want our own loved ones treated. But we can only hold people to this standard if we are ready to give them the help and support that they need to carry it out.

Could this happen at GBMC? It is my duty to assure that our incredibly hardworking physicians, nurses, advanced practitioners, other clinicians, and support staff teams have the equivalent of a safety button that they can push which will bring other leaders to help when they feel overwhelmed. I have shared this commentary with Dr. Jeff Sternlicht, medical director of our ED, and Monica Goetz, assistant nursing director, who oversee the emergency department, to have them assure our staff members that we will not leave them to deal with episodes like these on their own. What do you think?