Is health care really broken?

Oct. 25, 2017 / By Rebecca Caux-Harry

For those of you who are my regular readers, first, thank you so much! Second, you know I can get personal at times. This is going to be one of those times. For the past several years, the political attention to health care and coverage/payment reform has created a growing frustration for me. I’ve read so many articles and blogs proposing or defending changes that it has become almost impossible to keep up. Because I work within the business of health care, I know we have many areas we can and must improve, but I want to talk about a recent experience in the practice of health care. 

I lost my mother in June.  Her birthday is coming up in a few days. She would have been 81, and I really hate that she won’t be. She was a retired nurse from The Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. If you’ve never been to the Texas Medical Center, it’s worth a visit. On the surface, it looks like the business of health care run amok, but if you’re a patient, well, it’s a different story. And I think it’s a story that many forget when debating the future of health care in this country. But, maybe it’s just easier to gloss over the painful things we all have to endure.

I was in my mother’s hospital room sometimes up to twelve hours a day, just being with her. And while I usually think of physicians and mid-levels when discussing health care, it was her nurses that took care of her. I knew them all by name, and there were a lot of them. They were professional, caring, friendly and always available when Mom needed anything. They even made accommodations for family to spend the night in her room. They did this, not because she had worked at the very same hospital for many years, but because they recognized that the patient was a precious member of a family that was terrified and tired. My mother was the patient, but those wonderful nurses cared for me, too. And when it was clear that she was at the end of her life, as much as I didn’t want it to happen, nurses kindly and quietly supported all of us, my mother, my sister and brother, and me. As I think back on those painful days, I know that the practice of health care is not broken. 

We all want the experience we see on TV, where everything turns out fine in the end, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the worst possible outcome is the one we get. If we’re able to look back at that experience with a sense of peace, then we owe that to the hospital staff, all of them. After all, these nurses, providers, technicians, housekeepers and all those that support us during hospitalizations, want the same thing we do: A positive outcome. 

My mother was lucky. She had a challenging profession, and she was proactive in her health care. She also knew that managing her health was her job, and that physicians were assisting her in that job.  Most people won’t live 80 years without understanding this. While the powers-that-be debate endlessly about health care and how to pay for it, let’s not lose sight of the real issue, caring for our wellness AND our humanity. We’re all in this together.

Rebecca Caux-Harry, CPC, is the CodeRyte product specialist for cardiology with 3M Health Information Systems.