NH15689

Examen de Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Ce...

Medical Error Central

I have never had such a poor experience in healthcare as my visit with DHMC radiology.

1. No privacy. I could hear and see the personal info of every patient around me in the pre procedure area. Staff were routinely examining sensitive areas of other patients in view of everyone else in the room without even drawing their curtains closed. I had another patients’ chart up with all their medical info visible to me for the entire time in the pre-procedure area. Unbelievable privacy and HIPAA violations are occurring in this department.

2. Almost nobody introduces themselves or tells you who they are and what their role in your care is. You can’t tell who is a medical assistant, resident, nurse, attending, etc. I had no idea who was even going to be doing my procedure until I was literally strapped to a table and draped. 5 different staff were interacting with me pre-procedure and what I discussed and agreed upon with them was completely different than what occurred in the procedure room.

4. My doctor, David Munger was a terrible communicator. In the procedure room he launched into invasive interventions that I never agreed to. I had no idea what he was doing since he explained nothing prior or during the procedure. He never asked about pain levels and when I spoke to him or asked questions he didn’t even respond to me. He walked out of the procedure without saying a word to me. No aftercare instructions, no explanation of what he did or how it went, etc. I in no way gave informed consent for any of what was done. I had no idea what procedure I even had done until I read my record!

This department is extremely dangerous via lack of communication between staff and with patients. I went in with the understanding that I was having a very low risk procedure done. With no approval from me, the plan changed to something completely different that was never explained or agreed upon. They are treating patients like a factory assembly line and making huge errors in the process.

Patient relations was useless. They do not have patient best interests in mind and exist purely to protect the hospital from legal action by intimidating patients from filing complaints. They do absolutely nothing to improve blatant patient safety violations.