Why are hospitals so devilishly uncomfortable?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So I recently got back home after a delightful four night stay in one of our local hospitals due to “septic bursitis” and cellulitis around my left elbow/forearm that I apparently got via some insect bite or tiny break in the skin while on vacation. Long story short, that was my longest hospital stay to date, and the only one where I wasn’t drugged half out of my mind after some sort of orthopedic surgery.

What I noticed is that the whole experience seemed engineered to be as devilishly uncomfortable and inconvenient as it possibly could be. You’d think, as someone who hasn’t spent much time in hospitals, that they might possibly be somewhere engineered to let patients rest and heal in an environment conducive to resting and healling. You might further think that things might be designed with comfort in mind, so that patients can spend a long time in their beds comfortably and recuperate well.

That isn’t the case. The bed seems to be 2" of foam with some weird density properties- hard where it doesn’t need to be, and too soft where it needs to be firmer. Pillows are some combination of lumpy, thin, or just not comfortable. The TV remote/nurse call device doesn’t have any kind of holster/home that you can conveniently store it, so you can get it out of the way, and know where it always is, in case you need to call the nurse. And that adjustable bed just meant that I never could get it where I wanted it- every position ended up giving me a headache. Or maybe it was the lack of food…

And the nurses/staff? They were wonderful people and very helpful, but their schedule suuucks. There’s no reason whatsoever the labs people need to show up at 5:30, wake you up, and draw blood that early. Nor do the techs need to fool with the garbage so early, or take your vitals. Especially after they have given you IV antibiotics on an interval that only gives you about 4 hours of sleep at a stretch at best.

The food was… both better and worse than I expected. Better quality and better preparation than I had expected, but some joker decided I needed to be on the “heart healthy” diet, so everything I got had about zero salt in it. Which makes for some decidedly unappetizing food when you get down to it. And not much of it either.

So I basically spent 3.5 days in varying levels of discomfort in the hospital bed, with a constant low grade headache, constant slightly hunger, and always fairly sleep deprived.

Surely this isn’t intentional? I mean, I would have happily choked someone if I meant I didn’t have to spend another night in the hospital, but that can’t be the goal of all that? Is it more that most patients aren’t as aware as I was? Am I some kind of special snowflake? (generally I’m pretty accommodating to uncomfortable situations I think).

This whole thing seemed to be deliberately engineered to not let me sleep, and induce a constant low level of physical discomfort.

2

I have never been an admitted patient, but have looked after thousands. Hospital staff are overworked and so must organize their tasks in a timely way. Some patients need vital signs taken frequently. Hospital beds are expensive as they often require barriers, mobility, the ability to tilt or adjust the head and foot and other features. They might not be replaced as often as would be desirable. Some things are traditional, doctors expect blood work to be available when they do their morning rounds.

But some of it is just not thinking enough about comfort. There could likely be more efforts to reduce noise and fewer blinking lights and minimize interruptions for patients who do not need them. But many do.

I read a good article recently be a sleep expert who consulted with many doctors to improve the sleep environment. They claimed to make a difference with earlier discharges, at least in some settings. I might have linked to the article here in a different thread.

3

Those “there’s no reason” type exclamations are usually based only on the observer’s ignorance about very valid reasons.

4

I can’t speak to the patient beds but I’ve had the misfortune of spending a lot of time with my daughter in DC’s National Childrens hospital recently and generally the in-room guest bed/chair has been pretty comfortable (usually at least a lazy-boy type recliner, even in the shared rooms, and proper foldout bed in the private rooms). The exception was the one time she was kept in the ER for almost 24 hours (because the US healthcare bureaucracy is a shitshow) the comfiest guest seat was a plastic chair next to the trash cans (which made far from ideal pillow). Though actually that was a good thing, as she was a non-urgent case (other times she was whisked straight to the ICU as she was in a more serious condition)

The food is pretty much as expected from hospital food. Bland and uninteresting but edible.

5

There are massive problems with a shortage of staff. A lot of healthcare workers left during early and peak Covid because of risks to their health. This has caused a vicious cycle: there is more work and pressure on the ones left–so many are leaving because of too much stress. And with the booming economy there are good jobs elsewhere with less stress.

6

Bwahahahaha! Try 23 days*!
*My record.

7

A few years ago I was in the hospital unexpectedly for five days (I went to the ER assuming I had some trivial issue, which turned out not to be trivial at all).

The only real “discomfort” I had was more and more desperately missing all the amenities and comforts of home. As the days wore on I was so desperate to get home that I damn near walked right out of the place. I recalled being surprised when my dad was in the hospital, wondering why he complained about it so much – I kept assuring him that it was great to be so well looked after, surrounded by all these experts and all this fine equipment. Finally I understood. It was great for me because I knew he was being well cared for, but it was pretty shitty for him.

The hospital itself wasn’t bad, although the food was at best uninteresting and at worst rather crappy. The food service person informed me several days in that the “menu for the day” for each meal was just the default, and actually I could order whatever I wanted. Not that that was much help with the quality.

I must say though that I sort of enjoyed the experience in the catheter lab – the place where you get cardiac stents. The room was like something out of Star Wars, full of computers and robots, cool lights, and beeping and whirring things. And then they give you some great drugs. They could charge for the experience as an entertainment attraction and make a bundle! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

8

This is the assumption that fails.

Home is where you rest and heal. A hospital is an emergency treatment station to get you past a crisis by testing, constant monitoring,and reducing as many variables as possible. Care is regimented according to both best practices and the limited amount of staff time.

Plus they want you out as fast as possible because they need the bed for someone else. They don’t want you to get comfortable. You’re supposed to want out. It’s not a hotel, even though people expect many of the same amenities these days.

I spent two weeks in the hospital last year. I experienced many of the same small annoyances, plus bedpans. I spent every minute wanting to go home. Except that I had already gone home after a week and needed to return when I got worse. I went back not to rest, but to not die. When I stopped dying I went home. There’s a huge gulf between the two.

9

As someone who has had both infectious bursitis and spent 8 weeks - 2 acute care, 6 rehab - in the hospital, I can commiserate with you. The two are unrelated for me, my bursitis was treated with IV antibiotics in the ER over 2 days where I left in between doses.

The answer to virtually every “why do they do that?” question is “cost”. They will deliver the least they can while providing the appropriate level of care.

10

I just read an article, where, I can’t think. Mayo Clinic? Anyway, they’ve recently discovered (sarcasm) that waking people up in the middle of the night, keeping a television on all the time, shared bedrooms with strangers, and a number of other things I can’t remember but are all obvious, cause people to heal more slowly because they are sleep-deprived and unnecessarily stressed by their environment.

This hospital is taking steps to assure patients as full a night’s sleep as possible, and quiet, private rooms in which to heal. Crazy, no?

11

I was in the hospital 18 days in Jan 2021. UTI turned sepsis.I was so thankful to get out of ICU. The regular room was a relief.

I called the lab techs vampires. They came around 4AM. Get poked and go back to sleep.

Its the only hospital where the food is good. They offer a menu and you call-in. Otherwise you get the default meal.

12

I’m just guessing but I’m quite certain they draw bloods at those horrible hours because they want fasting blood work. 5:30AM is, roughly, eight hours after your last meal and before anyone can order breakfast.
And I assume it lets them get results while the majority of your doctors are actually there to write orders if things need to be addressed.

13

It’s been more than 30 years since I was in the hospital for about two weeks, but my biggest complaint at the time, besides what was killing me, was the difficulty in getting a full night’s rest.

14

My nurses went out of their way to take my evening blood draw at 10 and hold off my morning draw until 5:30, so I could use Ambien to get a full night’s sleep. So much of your comfort depends on what the nurses can get away with.

15

The five-day hospital stay to which I referred upthread was in a semi-private room, meaning a room shared with one other person, which is more or less the standard these days unless you want to pay actual money or actual private insurance for a fully private room.* It was uneventful except for one guy who was there for two nights and was a Loud Snorer. By “loud” I mean you could hear him a block away.

It was hard to get mad at the guy because he had been rushed in after very nearly dying of a major heart attack, and was being prepped for a quadruple bypass. He was also a very nice gentleman and fun to talk to. But dang, could he ever SNORE! I had to ask the nurse for a potent sleeping pill each of those nights, which had to go through equally potent bureaucracy, because heaven forfend that you should be allowed to get medication in a hospital!

* - On the positive side, the entire five-day hospital stay and all the medical procedures it entailed cost me exactly $0.

16

I think the biggest issue I had wasn’t so much the 5:30 part, its that there was a whole series of little things that happened starting at 5:30 - labs, then garbage removal/water bringing, then vitals-taking, and then the doctors would start showing up.

I felt like there wasn’t really any sort of coherent schedule- everyone just showed up according to their schedule, and to hell with how disruptive that was to me. That’s what I said “there was no good reason” about- I know there are lots of good reasons to do labs at 5:30.

But if they’re going to do that, then line up folks- do all your shit in a 45 minute block and let me go back to sleep, rather than pestering me every 15-35 minutes for the next 3 hours.

17

I’ve only spent a few days in the hospital, and I agree the bed was uncomfortable, it was noisy, bright, people came in at all hours. I slept terribly. Also they put some kind of thing on my legs that would pulse/clench/move occasionally, I think to promote circulation or something, but that would also wake me up when it went off.

I also got contradictory instructions from the nurses, which was annoying as hell.

The food was all over the map. Some of it terrible, some of it surprisingly delicious! And not in the way I expected. The sauteed and steamed vegetables were really good. Cooked perfectly and delivered hot and immediately after cooking. The sandwiches I think were made weekly and kept in a warmer until needed.

18

This is an issue where I’d be very curious, and have absolutely no idea, how the other advanced economies do it.

19

Intermittent pneumatic compression (IPC) devices used to help prevent blood clots in the deep veins of the legs,

20

Yes. I understand that clotting can be an issue in older patients, but I was like 30 years old at the time and after the first night when I complained they took them off and said I didn’t have to wear them, so I clearly wasn’t high risk and apparently standard procedure is to just pile on as many intermittent annoyances as possible so the patient can’t get a good night’s sleep.

ETA: I don’t have any of the risk factors listed on that page. And it seems crazy to me that “it’s hard to sleep when a thing grabs your legs every 20 minutes” isn’t a listed risk of the procedure. Sleep is important for good health, right?