I’m sure a lot depends on the procedure, type of anesthesia involved, and type of provider, and probably other variables. I have had minor procedures where they were fine with calling someone when it was time to pick me up, ones where the person had to be there at check in, and a surgery where I stayed overnight, and I think they probably would have released me to go home in a cab if I’d needed to. Of course, the surgery is the one that I most needed help at home afterwards, but that’s not really their problem – I met the criteria to go home: could get to the bathroom, walk OK, take oral pain meds.
For the surgery, I was out of it for quite a while after the surgery. For more minor procedures, I tend to recover quickly from the effects of the anesthesia. When I had an endoscopy, I was ready to prove I could walk by the time they got my spouse to come sit with me. They are often surprised at how quickly I’m ready to go.
Simple: If you haven’t pre-arranged for a companion, they will refuse to do the procedure. Of course you can always lie about it - depends on how strict they are about actually speaking with the companion (like the time I could have lied about my son being outside).
If you’re already in the hospital - e.g. for an overnight stay - certainly they cannot prevent you from leaving AMA. That would seem to be “false imprisonment” or some such illegal stuff.
In 2018 when I had my wrist surgery, my husband had just broken his knee and was on crutches. He wasn’t driving then either. The friend who took us to the surgical center dropped us off and went home (about 2 miles, or 5 minutes in a car). The discharge staffer got really snippy about having to call the friend herself, versus my husband saying “I just phoned for our ride”. This was with me being perfectly ambulatory, and my husband obviously being just fine - and he’d have been with me the whole way.
Contrast that with the incident I mentioned before, where we took an Uber to/from - that occurred just a month later, though it was a different hospital. Those people were not nearly so worried about the friend calling for the Uber herself.
Ok, so I had a procedure (at a hospital) this week and remembered this thread. Although I don’t know what practices this hospital followed pre-COVID, this is what happened :
I did not have to be accompanied to the hospital. If I was accompanied, that person could stay with me only through registration. Although there was a family waiting area pre-COVID, it was not available now.
I was not supposed to leave on my own. They would call my husband when the procedure was done and tell him what time to return. There seemed to be an issue with this procedure - the person next to me was ready to leave at around 3pm and her husband arrived by 3.But their son was not going to arrive until 6 to drive them home, and I don’t think the staffing anticipated this. Which may have had something to do with 3.
My husband was unable to find parking and after he spent 20 minutes or so looking, I asked if it would be possible for me to meet him at the entrance. I expected that perhaps staff would accompany me to the entrance and make sure my husband was there. Nope- someone walked me to the elevator and I was on my own. I could have taken a cab or jumped on the subway for all they knew.
This situation just popped up for me. The cheapest I could find in my city was $40/hour with a 4 hour minimum. (There were some 2 hour minimums, but their hourly rate was higher.)
Before the procedure, I had to give them the name/number of the company. They confirmed that everything was set up before starting. After everything was over, they must have called them (There were about 20 minutes after I got dressed that I was waiting near the procedure rooms - I could have snuck out and headed home, but I had already paid for the service.) Eventually, one of the nurses walked with me through the hospital’s corridors to the car. The medical companion picked me up from the hospital door and then drove all 3 blocks to my front door where they dropped me off on the other side of the street after asking “do you feel ok?”
There is no way that was better or safer than a Lyft. It was 20 times more expensive. (Luckily, mine is mostly covered by insurance - but that’s a waste of insurance money that could be going to keeping premiums down or paying for someone’s cancer treatment or something) There’s got to be a better solution especially with so many people living alone these days.
Ooh, I know the answer! I just scheduled a colonoscopy this afternoon, and they said my driver could not come in or wait around, so I’d need a ride to the clinic and a separate ride home two hours later.
No injunction against Uber was mentioned, and if I’m leaving the clinic and getting in a car in the parking lot, how would they know? (ps, I’ll have minimal sedation and will have no trouble walking out of the clinic)
And why is it any of their business anyhow? They’re already making personal decisions for me, telling me I’m not allowed to drive to their clinic…
There are several questions in the posts above. See if you can match each of the above questions with the correct answer below.
A. attorneys
B. liability insurance
C. legal issues
D. lawsuits
E. talk to the hand
F. solicitors
G. fear of Jesus (and his lawyers)
H. advocaten
I. lawyers
H. because FUCK YOU!
[*We reserve the right to determine what you consider “fun”; Placemats not filled out in purple ink are null and void (Except in Rhode Island, West Virginia, the Outer Hebrides, and the 8th Circle); Placemats have no cash value; Anything you say can and will be used against you and your mother]
You seem to have confused “lawyers” with “plaintiffs”.
If the public did not want to win the lottery on the back of their hospital or doctors, and if other members of the public who serve on juries didn’t want to award lottery winnings in such trials, the malpractice plaintiff’s bar would go hungry. Followed by withering away to nothing.
Would it be malpractice or negligence for hospitals to push recovering people out the door, with no care about where they’re going or what they’re doing next? It’s been tried before, look for stories about skid row in LA. Bars are liable if people drive home drunk, perhaps that is an inappropriate standard, but do we really want to hold hospitals to a lower standard than bars?
Some of the current requirements may be an overreaction, but no requirements is also wrong.
I was simply responding to the excessively cynical comment by @I_Love_Me_Vol.I that it’s all lawyer’s fault or because the medical industry likes annoying their customers. That’s all bunk.
The medical industry is at least partly responsible for your well-being from when you show up until you’ve recovered from the after-effects of whatever was done to you.
It’s obvious what problem(s) they’re trying to solve, but the solution they’ve implemented doesn’t solve that problem. And the way things are handled now, it is expensive and doesn’t solve the problem, making it the worst option.
And with over 1 out of every 4 households in the US is a person living alone (and that number is growing and getting older and more in need of medical services), it seems that the medical industry should start making some adjustments.
This. An Uber or Lyft driver isn’t going to be able to watch over you in the back seat as they are driving you home, they’re busy driving. Then there is the huge issue of liability for both the facility releasing you and the liability of Uber or Lyft. Why a friend or relative couldn’t Uber over, sign for you and the two of you be driven home, I do not know. Then your friend/relative is responsible, not the driver, which works.
There is no situation which makes it safe for someone to drive themselves home after a procedure like a colonoscopy, no matter how much they insist they are fine to drive. That they think they are fine is a sign they are not. Medical facilities are not doing this frivolously, all the flack they get is tiresome. They are doing it as a duty to care. Sign yourself out Against Medical Advice if you must insist and then take a cab home. They are then relieved of responsibility and you have accepted all risk for yourself.
An old nurse here, who has discharged many a grumbling patient and grumbled a time or two herself when she had to ask her ex to come pick her up because there was no other way, so this is meant more kindly than it sounds in black and white.
If everyone in this country got the medically necessary care they needed as a right instead of a costly privilege there would be less motivation for those left permanently maimed to seek deep pockets simply to cover the cost of staying alive.
In other words, neither of our scenarios covers everyone. There are several reasons for the malpractice muck in the US and quite a bit of it is related to our jacked-up healthcare “system” that is often more concerned with extracting profits than actually providing care.
Agree completely. Perverse incentives are everywhere. The people are ill-served. The whole thing is just another fine example of the USA’s dysfunction centered at the evil intersection of commercial profit before all, political/social exceptionalism, and personal short-sighted selfishness.
Anyone know what is done in other countries that don’t have America’s health care system? For example, what does a single person in the UK do when they have to go to and get home from a colonoscopy?
The problem with this is that I’ve never had the person picking me up sign for me nor have I ever siged anything it when picking someone up. And this is at multiple doctor’s offices/hospitals. The staff just lets me go when the person shows up - except for the most recent time. My husband was unable to find parking and after he spent 20 minutes or so looking, I asked if it would be possible for me to meet him at the entrance. I expected that perhaps staff would accompany me to the entrance and make sure my husband was there. Nope- someone walked me to the elevator and I was on my own. I could have taken a cab or jumped on the subway for all they knew.
If it’s so important that I be accompanied home by someone other than an Uber/cab driver, then why don’t they have that person sign something or show ID? They certainly don’t know if my friend/relative/neighbor is going to do anymore than what an Uber driver would. It’s entirely possible that that person will simply drop me off and never even enter my home. And if the Uber/cab driver isn’t going to be able to watch over me while they are busy driving, then how can my husband?
I suspect that in the end, a whole lot of this is based on what suits the doctor/hospital with little thought given to how difficult it makes things for the patients. Much like how I haven’t been in a crowded waiting room or waited 90 minutes past my appointment time in a doctor’s office in months - but pre-COVID it happened all the time.
The Uber driver is driving and must attend to that and all of Uber’s requirements, your accompanying spouse/friend is free to pay attention to how you are doing and immediately pull over and assist you if needed. Uber drivers don’t sign on to do this and understandably may not be willing to.
The signing for isn’t always literally sign a piece of paper, it can be the person making eye contact with the clinic staff and saying I’m here for “XXX”. When you arrive for the appt, they usually ask “who is picking you up? What number should we call to let them know you will be ready to go”? The person dropping you off at home without coming in is fine, if you are safely home and walking in the door. At least you haven’t fallen asleep, groggy from post anesthesia and ridden the train to the wrong stop or been robbed of your wallet by an anonymous Uber driver and left penniless and phoneless at an obscure street corner.
And how would it suit doctors/hospitals to require it if not because it keeps their patients safer and is good care? Trust me, it would be much, much easier to just let everyone to walk out the door to whatever their fate then to have to do all the questions and follow through and deal with the complaints. The reason it is done, even though it is much more work is because it protects patients, gets them home safely in the company of someone who there is reason to think is in a position to ensure their safety and to make the choice to turn around and come back if anything goes south. Nurses all know how difficult it is for patients-we are patients too.
If you have had success at getting walked to the elevator and leaving without being handed off to a person accepting responsibility, keep doing it. Please don’t come back later and sue the office/doctors if something bad happens and you were alone trying to handle it. The odds are in your favor but it will suck if you are in those few out of a hundred.
Just chiming in as another non-car-owner with the solution that worked for me for colonoscopy transportation:
Rented a car for a day with a non-car-owning friend as co-driver. Did a bunch of drivey errands, drove with friend to medical site, friend left her cellphone number as emergency contact and went off to do her own drivey errands. She picked me up after the procedure, drove me home, and returned the rental car at the end of the day.
Hella expensive if considered merely as transportation to and from the medical site, but very reasonable considered as a day’s worth of transportation to otherwise inaccessible places for two people who spend zero dollars on car ownership, not counting the compliance with required medical procedure issue.
Only happened to me once- at the place where I was walked to the elevator. Other places let me call myself when I was ready and didn’t even ask the name of the person picking me up.
My guess is that they feel it keeps them safe from being sued - but that doesn’t mean it really does. To say that the person picking me up “accepts responsibility” when they don’t sign anything and the doctor/hospital doesn’t even know their name means nothing. And if they don’t have the person sign something, if I sue the doctor for any of those things you mention, the fact that they say they didn’t let me leave alone, but don’t even have the name of the person who picked me up ( much less a signature) isn’t going to help them much. After all, if it’s so important that I not leave alone or with an Uber driver, it ought to be important to get the name and signature of the person picking me up. If they aren’t liable for whatever happens after I leave , they aren’t liable whether it’s a Uber driver or my husband. And if they are liable for something (and I’m pretty sure they aren’t) , they aren’t going to get out of liability by letting me leave with an untrained adult that they know nothing about.
It’s not really accurate to say I “had success” doing that, because it wasn’t what I was trying to do. I expected that I would either be told 'No" or that since it was at a hospital, the same procedure would be followed that I have always encountered when picking up someone from an inpatient stay - that someone from transport would take me down to the entrance to meet my husband. I was surprised to be walked to the elevator and allowed to leave on my own. ( and BTW, this one wasn’t a colonoscopy, it was a stent placement).
There’s a fundamental difference between someone signing a document assuming liability for something and a knowing look. And that the medical establishment is willing to accept a casual glance indicates to patients that this isn’t really important at all - it’s just a barrier and an expensive (in either time or money) one at that. Because eyeing someone doesn’t keep patients safer.
I realize that I do not have the breadth of experience that someone regularly involved in medical procedures does. But, in my case, I was no safer than I would have been with a taxi/uber/lyft or even just walking home. The transport company sent a driver in his personal car. The hospital called him. He drove to the pickup area. He drove 3 blocks. And dropped me off across the street from my place. He was gone before I made it to the front door. There was no follow-up. Had there been an emergency, he would have turned around and driven me to the ER. It cost over $150.
An Uber/Lyft would at least have tracked the ride from the hospital to my home. Yes, they may have abandoned me if I passed out - but it would be very clear that they dropped me off at my requested destination. I’m also assuming that rideshare services have a procedure for a rider who has a medical emergency on the ride like calling 911. If I had walked and collapsed on the way back, I would likely have been noticed and brought into the ER. Either of those solutions would have been under $20.
If it’s really imperative that I don’t drive within X hours of the procedure, don’t let me out for X hours of the procedure. Otherwise, it’s just safety theater (and bad theater at that) - even if the friend is there after the procedure is over, nothing is stopping the patient from being the one who gets behind the wheel. If it’s important that I’m checked in on for several hours after, then create a process that does that (e.g., a number that I have to call every 30 minutes or an app that I need to check in on at regular intervals).
Well, they CAN do this - as noted, I’ve been the responsible adult for a friend, when we had to take Uber to/from - and when I had my wrist surgery, had our friend not been able to pick us up, we could have called a cab/Lyft/Uber. My in-laws do this sort of thing somewhat regularly, as they do not drive.
There are numerous tales out there of people opting to have their colonoscopy sans sedation, for this very reason. Whether that’s a good idea, I can’t say - you could still experience hemorrhage or other issues due directly to the procedure.