Hospital Stay
Posted by
Tim Eckstrom on Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Categories:
Total Quality Management,
Systems Development
I have been fortunate to have been blessed with a relatively healthy 51 years. Until this past week it had been over 30 years since I have even stayed overnight in a hospital…then it was for some fairly minor ankle surgery. Time has a way of catching up though and this week brought the total replacement of my left hip. The years of athletics, mountain climbing with heavy packs and digging ditches contributed to a hip that wasn’t functioning very well. I am now the bionic man.
I am happy to report that the surgery went great, I went home a day early and am on the road to recovery. Now life is about doing my exercises 2-3 times a day so that I can get back out on the golf course in a couple months.
Many thanks go out first of all to my doctor, Dennis McGee of Intermountain Orthopedics in Boise (great job!), the great health care workers on the 9th floor of Saint Alphonsus Medical Center and I don’t want to forget the food service at the hospital provided by Thomas Cuisine Management of Meridian (I definitely didn’t lose any weight).
It was amazing to observe all the many systems that have to be in place to make sure that things go the way they are supposed to. Systems for making sure the ‘customer’ is as comfortable as possible during an anxious time, systems for getting the right medications in place to ensure a successful outcome, systems for monitoring ‘vitals’ at the right frequency, systems for dealing with situations that don’t go as planned…even systems for getting food to patients when they want it.
I realize that not every hospital stay goes as well as mine did (I can honestly say that I wasn’t in a big hurry to get out). I, for one, am grateful for the thousands of hours of work that have been put in developing and refining systems that will hopefully allow me to live a more productive life…and maybe even lower my golf score!!
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