Looks like CNN’s Glenn Beck won’t say what his local hospital’s CEO would like to hear when Press-Ganey call him! He accuses the staff there of not caring.

At the hospital I was often treated more like a number than a patient. At times, staff members literally turned their back on my cries of pain and pleas for help. In one case a nurse even stood by tapping his fingers as if he was bored while my tiny wife struggled to lift me off a waiting room couch.

So far he hasn’t named names, but I suspect that when it gets out, it’ll be worse for the hospital than it having a bad overall mortality rating in some obscure state report. After all when Don Berwick and David Lawrence wrote about their wife and mother respectively, they went out of the way to praise the staff, while castigating the care system. Beck is not so kind.

I’m not sure Beck’s solution is too constructive.

That’s why I don’t want to hear anymore about universal health care or HMOs or the evils of insurance companies until each and every hospital in this country can look me in the eye and tell me that they their staff is full of truly compassionate people who treat their visitors like patients, not products. Hire and train the right people, and then and only then come talk to me about everything else you need.

But his complaints are echoed in a series of videos from Health care for All in Massachusetts which also start talking about problems with care quality. I wonder if Paul Levy will name names about the hospitals in the last two videos—Both prominent Boston teaching hospitals that both screwed up big time with medical errors

Final thought: perhaps Michael Millenson is finally influencing people….while he’s even still alive!