Hospital Assessment: Fill & Download for Free

My wife was hit by a bolting horse last week resulting in 9 broken ribs, collapsed lung, badly damaged Spleen and severe internal bleeding.From the point of calling the ambulance at 1:00pm she was transferred to hospital, assessed, scanned, re-assessed, in surgery and into the Intensive Trauma Unit by by 7:30pm with every type of vital’s monitoring and auto drug dispensing equipment you could imagine along with one to one nursing.All the emergency and hospital staff involved were absolutely fantastic in their professionalism, attitude and speed in which they dealt with her which in turn has resulted in them in being able to save her Spleen. 9 days later she is now out of the Trauma Ward and able to move around albeit very carefully and with a little aid and her prognosis is for a full recovery which after the initial scan and assessment the consultant said would be touch and go.What did this cost me at the point of need, absolutely zero, what has it cost me since, £8 for a parking pass and £10 for a handful of magazines, everything else is covered by my Income Tax and National Insurance which last year totalled £8000 and as far as I am concerned worth every single penny and more.That is what the NHS is like when you really need it and that is why we should never allow it to be privatised and end up in the same boat as the USA.

Anyone who presents himself at an Emergency Room cannot, by federal law, be turned away until the hospital assesses him. The law is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) and every hospital that accepts federal money has to follow it.So, it is true that anyone can get at least ER care. If he cannot pay his bill, the hospital does several things:1) It will try to collect the money from the patient.2) It will determine whether the patient qualifies for Medicare or Medicaid, who would then pay his bill.3) It will write off the bill as "bad debt". This money then goes into the calculation of the hospital's Medicare and Medicaid rates. So the hospital does not lose this money, in a sense. It helps them command a higher rate from government payers.4) It will use the bad debt to justify its non-profit tax status, if it is non-profit. They are required to provide a certain amount of charity care, in order to keep their non-profit status.5) It will use the charity/bad debt care figures to pressure other payers to pay higher rates. This is called "cost shift" and is largely a negotiating tactic, not a reality. Studies show that when government plans pay hospitals 10% less, private payers 1% more -- not a balancing amount.

I was right beside her where when it happened.Sixteen months earlier, I heard a neurosurgeon say to me, "These do not heal." He was speaking of a diffuse pontine glioma - a tumor diffused more or less evenly thought the brain stem. Cheska was eight years three months old. We saw that tumor in an MRI just a few hours earlier.A widely renowned brain tumor researcher at Duke told me some months later that he observed a child to survive to age 20 about once in every 150 to 175 patients. Most vexing to him was that these survivors to that age showed no positive correlation to any specific therapy. Standard radiation and chemotherapy protocols at their best delayed what proved almost universally inevitable.We commenced the standard therapy until the brain tumor marched on in spite of this. Then we attempted several experimental protocols. Any benefits receded as quickly as they appeared. We were in the midst of one when she suffered a seizure in hospital. Assessing her overall health at this point, the oncologist sadly released her to return home to hospice care.Most of the time, brain tumor patients fall into a deep slumber, their vitals slow down, slower and slower, until they quietly cease to breathe, their faint heart beat simply stops. Cheska didn't depart this way. Because so many autonomous nervous control systems are governed from the brain stem, malfunctions of some autonomous systems can vary when a tumor compresses the nerve ganglia. In my daughter's case, the effect on her respiratory and circulatory systems was not to slow them down, but to accelerate some of their functions.Twelve hours before she died, she experienced tremendous respiratory secretions, which we were furiously evacuating from her throat to prevent her from drowning in them. This passed after a harrowing 90 minutes, and she lapsed into a quiet comatose condition. Once, when her aunt was checking on her as we were about to eat a bite of breakfast, she opened her eyes for the last time and smiled up at her. Later, our parish priest stopped by the house to administer Anglican rites for Christians at the point of death (including Holy Eucharist which we shared with her for the last time).Four hours passed, and then her heart rate ticked upward. When it reached 100 beats per minute, I called her oncologist to inquire about this. While rare, she explained, some patients' heart rates accelerated at the end. And, so, our daughter's did, rising relentlessly until it reached 200 beats per minute (she was wearing a heart-rate monitor on her wrist). The hospice nurse explained that it was not her heart that was diseased - it was what a normal nine-year old child would have, a healthy heart.And, so it went for the next hour, inching slowly but relentlessly upward. After two and a half hours of this marathon, at a heart rate of 235 beats a minute, her heart rate plummeted. It didn't stop suddenly, but just raced downward, until at around 50 beats per minute it stopped.She was lying in our bed, on the side I normally slept in, when she departed. I lay beside her. Mom was behind me. The room was full - two of her sisters, Grandpa, a long-time family friend, Aunt Kathy, our neighbors from next door, her friend from church. The sense is that she had raced at a sprinter's pace right out of the room.