The Patient-Centric Hospital
© Mark McWiggins 2024
I was a patient in St Claire Hospital in June 2024. It’s an excellent hospital; I had broken my hip but they fixed me up and I was out in 10 days.
But there are a couple of things that they could do to improve patient’s abilty to especially sleep in the hospital.
Here are my suggestions. I have 30 years of experience in software and systems and recent experience with security, email, web development and much more.
I’ve also recently moved into management; see my “manager as player coach” article on Medium.com.
Two things about my time at St. Claire. First (minor), the Bathroom lights go off after 2 minutes. This wasn’t a major problem just a little strange to get up and wave my arms to keep the lights on.
The larger issue is sleep. I understand hospitals have to work 24/7 and the nurses and doctors sometimes have to wake us up to work on us. But instead of working to a rigid MBA-set schedule, monitoring for the patients shows who’s asleep and awake and the system could be set so that nurses and doctors have the most efficient route between patients who are just about to wake up or already awake.
Also I quite clearly heard some nurses and other people discussing ball games while I was trying to sleep.
One other thing the hospital could do would be to pump in white noise through the intercom system. I use this sort of system to sleep at home and it works well.
One final thing: plumb in Bidets into the toilets. My choice is the Tushy portable since we live in a rental house. (This is NOT tushy.com .. that one is NSFW.) But the plumbed-in ones are very handy; we visited some local friends who had ones and they were great; they may even pay for themselves in toilet paper over the large budget that a hospital has command of.
Thanks, and good luck to all of you intrepid health care workers and best of luck!
Yours,
Mark McWiggins
