Growing up, The Curmudgeon was an active boy and would occasionally suffer the kinds of orthopedic injuries best treated in a hospital emergency room (yes, he knows, you were certain he was the kind of kid who barricaded himself in his room, reading books all day long. Wrong). The family joke is that his mother was so familiar with Philadelphia’s Nazareth Hospital that once, when a nurse said he’d go for an x-ray as soon as an orderly was available to take him, his mother turned to that nurse and said, “That’s okay, I can take him myself. I’ve been here often enough that I know the way.”
The family doctor was not amused by this anecdote. He told us that unless we were afraid we were having a heart attack or possibly bleeding to death, we were not to go to the neighborhood hospital and should instead take ten extra minutes to get to another, better hospital (a hospital that, ironically, went out of business long ago).
This bit of family lore came to mind recently when The Curmudgeon’s seventy-eight-year-old mother took a spill, breaking her arm (the upper arm, or humerous, although there was certainly nothing funny about it) and hitting her head and knee fairly hard. She lives within reasonable proximity of three hospitals and chose as her emergency room the one that was farthest away (only 4.4 miles and perhaps a twelve-minute ride) because she has several doctors there whom she likes.
Big mistake. Big, big mistake.
You may have heard of Holy Redeemer Hospital. It was in the news nearly two years ago over its botched attempt to merge with Abington Hospital, another suburban Philadelphia institution. Neither hospital can make it on its own in the brave new world of health care, but they’re a regular Jack and Mrs. Spratt: Holy Redeemer is strong on outpatient care and soft with its admissions numbers and Abington is strong on admissions and weak on its outpatient business. One could say they were a match made in heaven but that would be pushing the pun envelope because the deal foundered over matters that literally involved heaven and hell: Abington performs abortions, Holy Redeemer is a Catholic hospital and forbids them, and even though mergers between such philosophical opposites happen all the time, this one failed because the people in charge were too inept to manage the transaction with even a modicum of skill.
But we digress.
Back to the emergency room. Baby sister took mom to the hospital and the two older brothers joined them about a half-hour later.
And there we sat.
One hour.
Two hours.
Three hours.
Four hours.
Four-and-half hours.
No doctor – ever. Just a physician’s assistant.
Two trips for imaging: an x-ray on just the arm and then, apparently at the request of a consulting physician who couldn’t be bothered actually seeing the patient, a return to imaging for a CAT scan of the arm and the brain (because of the fall).
No attention to the head wound at all – not even a damp cloth to clean it and prevent infection. The family was still picking debris out of mom’s forehead a week later.
No inquiry about the patient’s ability to care for herself at home in her injured state (the family doctor, upon learning this, was furious at the hospital).
So to summarize: four-and-a-half hours in a hospital emergency room, never seeing a doctor, incomplete care, and inadequate discharge arrangements.
The Curmudgeon wrote to the hospital’s president about this – surely that won’t surprise you – and received an apology only for the amount of time it took to receive “emergency” care. The hospital president’s letter made no reference to the quality-of-care issue and did not respond to the portion of The Curmudgeon’s letter that asked
Aren’t hospital emergency rooms supposed to be staffed by actual doctors? If not, is there a meaningful difference between your ER and a CVS “minute clinic” or any other “doc-in-a-box” operation that hospitals love to malign but that appear to offer, at least based on this one situation, no less than what Holy Redeemer offers?
The following week The Curmudgeon received a second letter from the hospital’s president – this one addressing the quality-of-care issue. Among other things, he wrote:
I want you to know that we have undertaken a review of your mother’s case. While there is always room for improvement, we feel that the care she received was both appropriate and complete.
Later, The Curmudgeon learned that the family doctor who expressed displeasure with the quality of care delivered in the ER was “ripped a new one” by hospital officials (according to mom, and if you think it’s not more than a little disturbing to hear your elderly mother use a term like “ripped him a new one,” think again) who apparently don’t know the meaning of their own hospital’s name. If that happens again, the CEO of the hospital and his COO and medical director – you know, Shemp and Larry – are going to be on the receiving end of a curmudgeonly publicity blitz and fury the likes of which they and their hospital have never seen. The same is true for the virtual platoon of hospital staffers who invaded The Curmudgeon’s LinkedIn profile after the letter reached the hospital (no doubt after doing Google searches and, who knows, maybe even more. Maybe a background check or something involving Intelius).
There’s a lesson to be learned here: if you ever find yourself driving by Holy Redeemer Hospital, just outside of Philadelphia, you should do exactly that: drive right on by and do not – do not – do not – stop. Your good health may depend on it.
Crossing Against the Light: 
[…] especially during his youth, The Curmudgeon has spent his fair share of time in hospital ERs. He wrote a few years ago, in fact, about spending four hours in a hospital ER with his mother after she fell and broke her […]