You'd be amazed how bad hospitals can be at keeping track of fairly critical things.
I had a cousin who voluntarily checked himself into the hospital related to severe withdrawal symptoms (and had bouts of psychosis related to said with withdrawal - meth addictions are nasty). His mother stayed for awhile but had to leave for work. She was repeatedly guaranteed by multiple doctors and nurses that he could not check himself out and would be there for several days at least. They told her to come back the next morning.
Late that night, he was discharged. Not even "he checked himself out". The hospital discharged him (and that's over an hour ride away from home, btw - no hospitals in rural areas these days).
He had no phone and no wallet. According to staff, he tried to call his mother to pick him up, but couldn't remember her cell phone number (it had changed recently). He called his sister and left a message, but she was traveling and didn't get it until much later. According to the hospital, he tried to call several different numbers trying to get a ride home and they made him stop and made him leave. In a quite rough downtown area he was not familiar with. While clearly not in his right mind. At 2am. With no wallet, no phone, no nothing.
The hospital had his mother's contact info. They did not give it to him even when he requested it. They did not attempt to contact her in any way.
We still don't know what happened afterwards. His body was found four days later in the river and it had been there for awhile.
Forcibly discharging someone under those circumstances and refusing to even contact their emergency contacts is beyond belief. I'm furious about it. Apparently it's common and not even something there's any recourse for.
I wonder how much this correlates with socioeconomic status.
When my kids were born, the hospital had this incredibly elaborate, incredibly detailed checklists of things that needed to be in order before they would let you leave. Did you have a carseat? Did you have a ride home? Did the doctor come by and give you discharge instructions? Do you have all the belongings you came with? Did you fill out the birth certificate application? Have all your discharge papers been signed?
They actually wouldn't let my wife walk herself down - they had to call Transport, and she had to be wheeled down in a wheelchair with the baby's carseat on her lap, and I had to be waiting at the designated curbside to pick her up. She was perfectly capable of walking herself down, and we were both capable of putting the carseat into the car in a normal parking spot, but everything had to be done in the presence of an orderly.
This is the same health care company mentioned in the article, but at a pretty affluent suburb of Silicon Valley.
None of those checklist things are done out of an interest in care - it is about avoiding liability.
I don't understand the completely unnecessary cynicism in this comment.
Do you really believe that everyone working in maternity wards in hospitals cares absolutely nothing about babies?
They didn't say that, they said the checklist is there for liability reasons and not for genuine care reasons.
The "won't let mom walk to the door" thing is a great microcosm of that—it's a blanket policy applied to all mothers regardless of need.
My wife had our youngest at home but we had to take her to the hospital afterward because her lungs were a little sticky and she needed a respirator for ~4 hours. I took our daughter in and my wife followed a few hours later, walking all the way into the hospital.
The NICU wouldn't discharge us for two days (which is a whole liability > care story of its own), but when they finally did they insisted that my wife—who had had the baby at home and driven to and walked into the hospital while mere hours postpartum—needed to be in a wheelchair to the curb.
We liked that shift of nurses, they clearly cared, but no one in that room looked at my wife standing by the warmer and thought "she needs a wheelchair". They had a checklist and they were going to be darn sure they followed it.
You can always refuse. They can't kidnap you or the baby if for whatever reason you don't want a wheelchair, and it's almost always illegal to block the exits without a court order or documented altered mental status.
I appreciate your willingness to push for your rights here. But the situation is surprisingly similar to refusing to let a cop search your trunk. You can say no, but that K-9 unit is going to take four hours to get there from the station 20 minutes away. They will make your life hell.
I've definitely been in hospital situations with my children where I was honestly afraid (perceived or real threat, I still don't know) that they were going to report me for child abuse if I took my kids home and refused care. People with authority are kinda scary, and while I love for us to all choose rights over security, sometimes I just don't want to have to fight for everything.
And this is where police states evolve from.
Holding someone for longer than the traffic stop requires to wait for a drug dog is illegal in the USA. That's not to say it never happens, but it's grounds to exclude any evidence found, and for a lawsuit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodriguez_v._United_States
Over half the population doesn't have the funds to enforce that and effectively ultimately has no such rights in this situation and many like it.
Not to mention that proving that the drug dog didn't actually need to take that long would probably be extremely difficult.
How long the drug dog needs is irrelevant; if they want to use a dog without consent or probable cause to search, they need to get it there while they still have legal grounds to detain the suspect. A traffic violation is grounds to detain someone long enough to issue a citation, but not longer.
The judge won't be amused if the police say it took them 45 minutes to write a speeding ticket.
After 48 hours of putting up with hospital rules in order to avoid an AMA discharge, we were just happy to be done. They certainly didn't frame it as optional, and it wasn't worth the fight.
None of what you said supports that checklist following is only for decreasing liability and not towards patient wellness. It may be the case but it doesn't really follow though.
It doesn't prove anything, but I consider it to be a strong anecdote supporting the argument that individual wellness is not the primary motivation for these checklists.
I can see an argument that it's about increasing average wellness across all people ever taken care of by that NICU, but from the perspective of an individual patient there's no difference between the two motivations—the point is that your own care is not the important thing to the hospital at that time, what's important is the rules and regulations.
In our case, we both felt that our care was actually actively hampered by NICU discharge rules that were designed for premature babies and were completely inappropriate for our late-term baby. The wheelchair was just the last hurrah of the situationally-inappropriate hospital regulations.
The story doesn't prove "only" by itself, but it's a good example of the checklist doing something for liability and not wellness.
Have you seen the itemized bills for giving birth in an American hospital? They'll even try to mutilate an infant boy and charge you for it unless you emphatically opt out.
I want to see the criminals in the medical ethics community who ever greenlit this nonsense to have justice served upon them. Europeans would jail American doctors for what they do to babies here.
are you talking about circumcision? Do they do that automatically to all newborns?
It is not automatic, but it is default behavior.
Re: Understanding the cynicism: For example it is intriguing that they insisted on using a wheelchair to get in the car, but not to get out. But what's even more revealing is that the child had to be in a car seat while on his mother's lap.
There are some circumstances where people don't realize they can just say "no".
I suspect this is one such case.
But your not being taken care of by a person. Your being taken care of by the system. The nice nurse goes home in 3 hours, the nice doctor has 9 other patients. The secretary relies on the information in The computer. The people may very well care a lot. The system does not.
Checklists have been demonstrated to improve care quality because when it's the not-so-nice nurse that's on shift, and the doctor's been awake for 60 hours straight, the stuff that's on the checklist still gets done.
Everyone in maternity wards is underpaid and overworked, and the checklist is there and rigorously followed so we don't have mothers with c-sections tearing open on the way out because no one brought a wheelchair.
I don't understand that one very much. If walking is going to tear them open, isn't it better to have that happen at the hospital instead of half an hour later at home? I don't think much healing is going to happen in between.
Is the risk sufficiently on a per-step basis to make that worth it?
One can be forced to mindlessly perform ridiculously constricting duties that have everything to do with limiting liability and nothing to do with outcomes, while also caring about babies.
“It’s the corporations, mahn!”
Is go further and say that all doctors who work in those wards and perform male genital mutilation must hate babies, otherwise I have no explanation for how they can ignore the fact that their European peers would throw most American doctors in jail for the things they do to newborns.
...which might still be socioeconomically correlated. People who make half a million a year can afford lawyers. People who make $50K/year generally cannot.
The interesting point here is about how so many institutions become so much sloppier when the legal system becomes unaffordable for a majority of residents. Unsurprising, but it has pretty far-flung consequences if you're trying to root-cause why so much of America seems like a 3rd-world country today.
I get tired of the constant deferral to socioeconomics as an excuse. It's pretty simple, we don't allow people to be born with zero documentation in the US. This would be a massive fuckup, and it doesn't matter if the kid is poor, they still need a birth certificate to get a social security number. They've had a long time to put whatever systems in place prevent that from getting missed, even in the poorest zip codes.
And as far as safety, it's not always legal liability. I'm sure a good portion is, but we're talking about newborn babies right now. Most people don't want to have any part in a newborn being harmed, so it's trivially easy to get employees to take that stuff seriously.
We do let millions of people in without documentation, and they are nearly all poor. The underclass somehow manages while the upper class ducks everything up.
Nobody's excusing anything. It's an explanation. You're comparing apples to oranges: things that are free and done by the state compared to things that cost done by for-profit corporations.
Going to disagree hard here, numerous studies have shown checklists improve patient outcome. Similarly, they improve safety in numerous industries. And requiring two person sign off on dangerous actions in the hospital also improves outcomes. Sure, following these practices is helpful in a lawsuit, but primarily because they are best practices.
I'm pretty sure that the person you're replying to isn't making a claim about the utility of checklists but the content of the enumerated checklist items.
Only in the USA will you see people being rolled in a wheelchair at the door.
The only reason is people love to sue for anything in this country. This is unrelated to best practices.
Having a low child mortality is important, and we've done so many good things in the last couple of decades, but I'm starting to think we're at the point now where the money you have to spend to make a meaningful difference is better spent in other areas of health care.
A classical example of this is in Norway. There's nothing that gives you access to more resources than being pregnant or being in care of a newborn. You can suffer from all kinds of mental health issues for your entire life, struggle to be a productive member of society and be in and out of temporary treatment and be on social benefits. But the moment someone is pregnant they get will be top priority for anything that is even remotely connected with child mortality, almost regardless of how benign something is.
I personally know several people that finally got the help they had been so desperately been begging for, just because they got pregnant. We could have saved them from literal decades of suffering by just providing good treatment early. I'm willing to bet that we'd even be in a position to spend even more money on reducing child mortality, because when you start doing the math of how much they ended up costing society it really adds up.
Those checklists have done a good job preventing infant kidnapping.
We had the opposite. They tried on multiple occasions to evict my wife after a C section while she was in an incredible amount of pain.
They kept giving her an oxy in the morning, then after it set in, asking her to rate her pain level, and recording it. Which is backwards.
Then they blamed her for not asking for more pain meds, which she had.
Then they told her to just ask for more pain meds, which we did.
Then the nurse told her that shes not allowed to have any more pain meds. At which point I went full Karen, got our stay extended by 2 nights.
Apparently the midwives expected her to be walking up and down the corridor, which was not a requirement and not part of the treatment, just to demonstrate her pain levels.
I have tonic-clonic seizures; at least 4 hospitals have wheeled me out that way, suffering no argument otherwise. I guess it is common.
A lot. A friend worked for years in a well known hospital in PHL (that closed somewhat recently), and they were pushed to get people with no insurance out as fast as they could.
If they know you won't be paying, they will try to kick you out as fast as they can and consequences be damned, if you don't have insurance you likely don't know/understand your rights and wouldn't sue them.
When I was a teenageer a school counselor incorrectly perceived me to be in a crisis and had me sent to 72 hour hold (which stays on certain records for quite a while and can be incredibly disruptive, but that's besides the point) - for some reason I was sent almost 40 miles away in another county in a city I'd never been. The hospital doctors took one look at me and realized I didn't belong there, but to do a discharge apparently is a pretty lengthy process once this process is initiated - almost 20 hours later (again, being held completely against my will for no reason) they released me. I asked them where I was supposed to go and if I could call my dad. They said no, but they gave me two (2) bus tokens, which wasn't enough to get back where my car was parked at the school, plus I had no idea how to use the bus system in that county, and didn't have my glasses, phone, or wallet.
I really don't know how long it took or how I made it, but many many hours later I made it back to my car. I had to beg for money and walk the last several miles once I recognized finally where I was. It really sucked, and ever since then I've had a great deal of sympathy for people that are churned through this terrible system and spit right back out with no dignity whatsoever, let alone empathy. This incident disrupted my life irreversibly (ended up missing tests and having to do a medical withdrawal from school, lost scholarships, etc) and derailed a lot of things I had wanted to do for many, many years. The hospital/medical care industrial complex doesn't optimize for empathy. They're just trying to get the bodies through as quickly as possible.
Oftentimes it's not even that, or can go to the opposite extreme. It can be "or until evaluated by a psychiatrist or MHP".
I'm a paramedic in Washington. The biggest example of this I remember was a 14yo, intentional pharma overdose. We brought her in, "invol". Four and a half hours later, call goes out, same address, 14 year old girl, overdose. We checked with dispatch, was there a glitch?
Nope. Psychiatrist had spoken to her, determined she was "no threat to herself". Parents drove her home, and within fifteen minutes she'd locked herself in the bathroom again, and taken more of the same meds.
Was furious. Between the psychiatrist, parents not locking up the meds, hell, the ER, she probably still had drugs in her system.
"Maybe hold on to her for more than four hours this time."
Also, tangentially, if EMS wants to transport you involuntarily, we actually need Law Enforcement involvement - they don't even necessarily need to talk to the patient, but they do need to complete the paperwork that takes them into custody, which they then "assign" to us. EMS generally has no power to treat you against your will (however, if you are actively a threat to yourself, we can act on that, usually restraint and sedation. Or there is 'implied consent' where if you lose the ability to effectively consent, the law assumes that a rational person would want aid to be rendered).
I’m aware of a lot of this dynamic and have written extensively about it elsewhere - in this case though, especially looking back, it was ridiculous. I was extremely stressed about finals and didnt know what to do. Was borderline homeless and struggling to support myself. I had never seen a counselor or therapist before and was mildly depressed. she asked me a few leading questions like “how would you feel if you failed your finals and dropped out?” and I said something along the lines of “I guess I’d feel suicidal.” then, “do you feel suicidal now?” and I said I wasn’t sure. Then she goes, “so you cant tell me if you go home right now, you cant guarantee me you won’t kill yourself?”
now at this point I had zero ideation even, no plan, no intentions of killing myself, but being a pedantic dork studying philosophy I said I wasn’t sure about that, because I really wasn’t sure what to say. 10 minutes later a cop shows up, puts me in handcuffs, parades me off campus in them and people I knew saw it. I had absolutely no clue what was going on and had to sign papers I didn’t want to sign and when I protested the answer was basically “you can come voluntarily or with force, your choice.”
It ended up doing far more harm than good for me. I know physicians personally that will often throw people into 72 hour holds in the ER “just to be safe,” either not understanding or caring the long term consequences of being put in an involuntary hold. These same physicians have told me she did the “right” thing but anyone with common sense and experience could figure out very quickly I was not a danger to anyone. I was just trying to find some help because I was overwhelmed.
I am very sorry for your experience - that's entirely horrible.
I'm the same as you, too, and pondering the deeper, thinking answers.
That whole process sounds messed up. I would say over 99% (and that's not an exaggeration, but literal) of our invol patients do not have police involved (other than to submit paperwork to the hospital), let alone cuffs. Our EMS protocols DO require soft restraints during transport, but we generally make a point of being apologetic about it, putting them on at the last moment and that we will take them off ASAP (essentially once the ambulance is in Park). Even this is only because, unfortunately, some of those patients have attempted to exit a moving ambulance, sometimes at freeway speeds.
I'm curious what papers were put in front of you, though, as the whole point of the involuntary custody process is that your acknowledgement is not necessary (at that point - after the mental health hold hearing, in front of a judge - you are asked to acknowledge/sign, but not required).
This is california law and I believe the code is 51-50 but this is over 20 years ago so I’m a little fuzzy. I think looking back they were just liability papers the university was having me sign, I remember having to acknowledge things (that I didnt have time to read) that I wouldnt be able to purchase a firearm for 7 years and a whole bunch of other legal gobbledegook about being detained and what my rights were. The whole time a cop is standing above me making me sign it though and no one was answering my questions. I was extraordinarily confused for most of it until the cuffs went on and I had kind of a vague understanding I had said something wrong. At no point did anyone tell me what I did other than to tell me stuff like “you’re very ill and are being looked after for your own safety, care will be provided to you and you will be ok” kind of stuff. I cannot stress enough that this assessment was based on less than a 10 minute conversation with me. They even had a followup with me I was forced to go to, because I had missed the finals (because i was gone for like 3 days) and therefore actually failed. So they then convinced me to do a medical withdrawal to save my grade which very ironically led me to actually dropping out because I lost all my scholarships and grants. I would have probably been fine had I never sought help, and I suspect although my experience was extreme and probably malfeasant, that this treatment of people undergoing difficult mental things is probably very commonplace within the system.
This happened to a friend of mine in the last year. He went to the ER for something and joked about feeling suicidal. Meanwhile people I know who are actually suicidal are impossible to get admitted. Sorry that happened to you. I really wish there was a better feedback mechanism in American healthcare
Thanks, ironically this is one of those policies that has misaligned incentives everywhere. The doctor does not have any incentive other than to "play extra safe" and punt anyone they think is having a crisis into other hands - they're usually very busy, especially in the ER, which is typically full of mentally ill people. This has the opposite effect of actually helping people though - what happens to your friend if he actually is feeling suicidal in the future? 0 chance he seeks help, it's way too risky to even state outloud. And when people have no outlet for this kind of problem or thoughts, bad things happen.
Looking back with a more historical lens I think at the time this happened for me was shortly after columbine and everyone was freaked out about mentally ill people shooting up a place because that had at that time been a shocking incident.
How could they do that without notifying your parents and telling them exactly where you've been sent to, and what they should do?!
How could they've done that without giving the hospital your parents' contact info? How could the hospital accept you without requesting it, given that you were sent from school, where you have limited rights because they have the responsibility for your well-being?
How could have they discharged without allowing you to contact your family yourself?
This should be grounds for a civil lawsuit, if not criminal prosecution. I am not a lawyer, but I really hope that anyone reading this would contact one if they end in a situation like that.
>They're just trying to get the bodies through as quickly as possible.
I don't think taking 30 seconds over those 20 hours to contact your family would've slowed them down any.
This is not about efficiency. They should not be allowed to operate.
I was an adult and had been independent since 17. I do not recall the hospital ever asking me for contact info. I had nothing on me except my keys, no id. and frankly by the time I had got there in cuffs and realized what was happening was not in a great mood to cooperate, either.
I know for a fact the school never contacted my emergency contacts but there wasn’t really anyone to contact to begin with so I don’t fault them for that.
What should have happened was I referred to a school therapist or actual doctor.
To explain further what this place was like - it was the county mental facility at a large hospital. imagine a toned down version nurse ratchet kind of setting, people defecating on themselves, screaming, people in straight jackets. and then me, a slightly disheveled kid who was stressed about finals. they wanted me out of there immediately once they realized what was going on because they were already full. then when they process the paper work you get shuffled to a front desk behind a window who just wants you out of their sight ASAP. I remember I had to actually argue for the bus tokens and the woman seemed exasperated with even that.
That’s their problem, especially if they deal with proper mental issues, you can’t just dump these kind of people on the street.
In these times having people dumped on the streets seems rather like a feature, not a bug. Liberty! screech
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...
That must be why health care is so affordable (/s)
Profitable
One time I went to A&E in the UK, I saw a young unconscious woman outside, laying next to a wheelchair. I told the receptionist and was told she had to come in for treatment. Another patient tried to get her into the wheelchair but ultimately I got an ambulance involved to bring her in.
The nurse then recognized the woman, for it was the very nurse who had rolled her out for fresh air some time ago.
It was a cold night, as well. I think there was some snow, or it was about to snow.
There is definitely an over-reliance on schematics in emergency medicine. The moment a slightly more complicated patient is involved or one falls outside the schematic otherwise, their risk of serious health injury or death goes up a lot.
This was always interesting to me. I went to medschool, and I remember my peers as people who genuinely wanted to help others. Few would have refused to help someone collapsed outside in the cold. But our medical system has changed a lot, many more people do it for the pay slip. Most probably still care about the patients but I suppose some portion genuinely don’t. If it’s not on the schematic, they won’t care for it.
I've always had the experience that all employees at hospitals act like contractors. Usually great at what they do but no sense or willingness to look beyond their direct job responsibility.
I have worked in an hospital and that is clearly not true.
There’s a common reason for that: overworked, over stressed, and underpaid. Eventually the exhaustion will turn you into a numb zombie clocking in and out. There’s no easy solution since healthcare is already expensive.
Being overworked will do that to you.
It’s like asking a software engineer to write a hundred new features in a given sprint while the rest of the application is in flames. Eventually you stop aspiring to build good software and just hope enough of your code works that it’s good enough for some people.
Unfortunately medical services are literal life and death services. So we have it much easier as software engineers.
I don't know why I read the last part "medieval services are literal life and death services".
that is, until people who work in literal life and death services have to use software written by overworked engineers...
Got to experience that first-hand when my partner lost her pregnancy. We went in for the procedure to remove the nonviable fetus and were advised we had 14 days to arrange for a mortuary to take the remains if we wished to keep them, which we did. At 7 days when the mortuary tried to arrange for pick-up, we were informed that the hospital had disposed of the remains. It was "very uncommon" for people to want to take the remains, so they got lax in following their procedure and jumped the guns. Left us nothing to take home. It still sucks.
that stuff is worth a lot, probably went to the highest bidder, tissue banks, stem cells, ... they probably tell the same to all the parents, to redirect the anger towards some average Jane and Joe... while trying not to visualize the ice and careful packaging in which they got it "disposed off" through some medical courier.
(sarcasm warning) But who can fault them, imagine they had to explain to each pair of parents from scratch what is happening behind the scenes, and how such decisions are being made with little to no public discussion let alone democratic oversight? The time it would take compared to the harvesting itself would be intolerable. Intolerable! Not to speak of having to invest in bulletproof panes from behind which they would quickly learn to explain all this.
That's some conspiracy stuff, got proof? I mean... You're not even a real doctor, you make pizza's.
I'm not OP but John Oliver had a pretty good episode about hospitals, organ donation organisations and even non-profits, all benefit from a opaque system intentionally designed to hide where bodies go when "disposed" -- Here's a youtube link to the episode (may be blocked in certain regions due to copyright) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn7egDQ9lPg
That sucks. I hope you will get to take home a healthy baby in your future.
Thank you, we're hoping so too.
Such professionalism and high quality care like this are why American doctors deserve their huge salaries, massive houses and vacation properties, boats and sports cars, and of course are entitled to our thanks and adoration. Truly, a saintly class of people who all got into this line of work to help people.
I think the doctors aren't the ones to blame here, it's the hospital administrators.
American doctors want the public to believe they are powerless victims of the system that makes them wealthy while bankrupting patients.
News flash - most doctors all over the world are doing it for money and status. It's a job.
Are they suing the hospital and care team for many millions of dollars? That's the level of neglect of responsibility that should get you enough money to own the hospital that did that kind of thing.
I regularly have to aggressively bully medical care teams for myself and others to get them to do the right, obvious things.
I do not trust doctors, they do not care to figure out problems, ignore so many people's problems, and make wildly stupid mistakes all of the time.
Did you try clicking the link? They are. 5 million dollars. I expect they will win, and that still won't make them whole.
You’re replying to someone who in turn was asking the GP a question about their comment, not about the article.
It's a sad fact but hospitals have no one who is responsible for advocating for your care. I think it's a major ethical flaw in our entire healthcare model. People are not medical experts or legal experts and when they are suffering they're even less capable of handling that burden.
To expect the hospital with a financial incentive to do this is absolute folly. It just doesn't happen. They'll _absolutely_ get your insurance information, even when you're laying in the ER and doctors are still attending to you, but they'll provide you less than nothing when it comes to understanding your care and your options.
We afford people public defenders as disinterested third parties when they're accused of the most petty of crimes, yet, you're absolutely on your own when it comes to the hospital. This is a complete social moral failure.
The number one actual reason to have kids is to guarantee that you have your own de facto “medical advocate” who will do all of what you described for you.
Those who don’t have kids will learn quickly how hospitals treat those without children. It’s not pretty.
To force someone out who was guaranteed wouldn't be; to withhold documented caretaker/relative phone numbers from them when they have no other help; then to force them from the premises with no resources.
I want this to be a lie, but I don't treat HN comments that way. This is horrible, absolutely appalling.
I am so sorry for what happened to your brother and your family.
The hospital is directly responsible for your cousin's death.
The fact that they assured the mother that they'll keep him, specifically told her to come the next day, and then forcibly discharged him at 2am without either calling his mother or even providing mother's contact to him should be grounds for criminal prosecution.
This is beyond negligence. They lied to the mother and knowingly forced him out when they were responsible for his well-being.
It would've cost them $0.00 to dial his mom's number. The fact that he asked for his mom's phone and they refused means they did it on purpose. This sounds very much like and indication of malicious intent to me.
I hope your family sues the bejeesus out of the hospital, and that someone will get a felony charge over this.
This hospital mot merely betrayed the trust of your family. It is literally a public health hazard. It should not continue existing.
I don’t know what it is legally but morally that is negligent manslaughter.
Reading that makes me incredibly outraged. I'm sorry that happened and your family had to go through that.
Last time I went to the ER, they checked me in under the completely wrong name. Like it wasn't even close. Luckily I noticed the wrist band was wrong and pointed it out, but they then had to re-do tests since they had been done under the other person. It really makes me think how bad that could have been though. What if I went unconscious, and they used the info on the wrist band to look up medical history? What if they gave me medication based on that incorrect history? And at the very least they wouldn't have the right emergency contact info...
should be
if it's true that he was discharged and didn't leave against medical advice, that sounds like a fairly straightforward and expensive lawsuit against the hospital. And some hospitals only change their behavior when beaten by large expensive lawsuits...
Good lord that's awful, I'm sorry for your loss.