Monday, I returned from north Georgia to attend a orientation at Grady Memorial Hospital. Over the next few months, I'll be volunteering a few hours a week at ATL's trauma hotbed, the Grady ER. If anything, the orientation was a frustrating example of the inefficiency of our public health system.
The session was scheduled to begin at 4pm with no listed completion time. (Did you catch the subtle foreshadowing in the previous sentence?) I arrived a few minutes early and walked into a room packed with about 30 people. Some were sitting; about a third of us were standing because there were only about 20 chairs. At one end of a long conference table, a nurse administered TB skin tests. At the other end, a woman took photos for ID badges.
At first, I wondered if this was some sort of social experiment in which a bunch of people were cramped into a room and left to descend into chaos. Essentially, that's what it amounted to minus any scientific observation or the death of some fat kid with glasses. The volunteer coordinator was noticeably absent. There was no order to anything: no lines for photos or injections, no circulation of paperwork, no explanation for what we needed to be doing. We simply jockeyed for position, stared at one another, and laughed at it all. Occasionally, the volunteer coordinator's secretary popped into the room and looked around. Later, she announced that the orientation would take place in a "larger" room upstairs that could accommodate everyone. She instructed us to go upstairs when we finished with the photo and TB test.
At 5:15 pm, I made it upstairs and joined the masses. We sat there waiting for everyone to join. Again, nobody official was present to set any sort of expectation of when we'd even begin, much less finish. It was apparent that we were waiting on every person to arrive before starting. "Obviously, there is some really important information that we'll get if we're waiting for everyone to begin," I thought.
At 5:30, an hour and a half late, orientation started. Everyone received an information packet full of papers and protocols. Finally, the volunteer coordinator swept into the room and promptly began the orientation by bitching about how slow the nurse was, complaining about how this particular nurse would never be back at orientation, questioning the nurse's professionalism, and other rantings that demonstrated a glaring lack of professional decorum. After being delayed an hour and a half, I was thrilled to see her using everyone's time so wisely and respectfully. Honestly, it was a fantastic use of my afternoon. I listened intently from the edge of my seat, waiting on her next enlightening words!
Next, she reviewed the contents of our packets which contained mostly administrative info for those new to the hospital. (In retrospect, this portion of the orientation was the most informative and efficient.) Then, she read, verbatim, a two page checklist in our packet that we were apparently incapable of reading ourselves. She did, however, add tons of insight to it with comments like: "I don't know why those elevators are sooooo slow but they are. You should really be ready to wait and wait. You could take the stairs but not if you're going up to a really high floor. You wouldn't want to do that." My eyes welled with tears; I swallowed my tongue.
Next, we flipped though our packet to the hospital's policy regarding respectful treatment of its patients. In theory, we were to read this policy and sign it. Instead, we were treated to a 10 minute explanation of it. She performed a lively, dramatic reading of it, frequently pausing to embellish it with every scenario one could imagine! This is the hospital's policy toward patients:
Treat everyone respectfully. Even the poor people. Even the crazy people. Even the homeless people. Even the poor, crazy, homeless people.(Now, try to turn it into a 10-minute song and dance number. Hard, huh?)
The crown jewel of the whole ordeal was her review of the following safety pamphlet:
Based on a 2-minute review, it's not too important.In my opinion, this was perhaps the most critical thing in the whole damned packet. Time spent to review it: 2 minutes. These 120 high-powered seconds included a lackluster paraphrase of the entire brochure and the answers to the quiz we were required to complete, sign, and submit as part of our training.
She attempted to conclude the session by having everyone sign and submit their forms individually, so that she could make sure the handwriting was legible. I had none of it; I went around the room, collected everyone's forms, and gave them to her. This seemed to catch her off guard, as if nobody had ever given her a stack of papers.
So, to recap: an insanely elaborate explanation of "be nice to people" and a ten-second, oversimplification on how to avoid accidentally contracting a lethal infection. Correctly prioritized? You bet your ass it is. (Be sure to ask me again in a couple of weeks when I'm in Denver for treatment of the drug-resistant TB that I'll soon contract.)
That's just the way it goes at Grady, I guess. It's not like I shouldn't have expected things in the administration to be the same version of the bat-shit craziness that goes on in the ER. Hopefully, I won't have to sit through any more of this woman's presentations. If so, I'll definitely bring something I can use to stab myself which would get me to the ER where people are a little more sane.
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