also passing this along

Blogger Michael Hurt of Scribblings of the Metropolitician suffered a stroke earlier this month. All the news can be found at ZenKimchi.

This kinda' bugged me, but it sounds so familiar:

Mike’s mother is Korean and works in the cardiology section of a hospital in the U.S. But she’s admitted that being in a Korean hospital has been a bit of a culture shock. She has to go buy supplies that American hospitals usually have available in the rooms, like rubber gloves. Patients in Korean hospitals don’t really get much care. The families supply the meals. There’s little, if any, concept of bedside manner. And the lack of communication is astounding. [emphasis added]

For example, they had trouble tapping a vein to get some blood. So a doctor set up a tap so that hospital workers could easily get blood when needed. That didn’t stop some person at 4 a.m. from sticking his foot to try to get more blood.

Joe goes on to talk about one of the positives of Korean hospitals. Be sure to click over and read. For me, one of the things I dread about a long-term stay in Korea is precisely the question of hospital care. Not that the American system is perfect-- over at the Kevin's Walk blog, I wrote at length, on several occasions, about the problems our family experienced with Mom's care-- but the Korean system often seems to lack certain basics, like proper and thorough communication, whose absence would make a hospital stay nightmarish. Patient advocacy seems even more important in the Korean system than it is in the American system.


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