Centennial Peaks Hospital

Centennial Peaks Hospital
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Everyone Deserves the Finest Health Care!
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Thursday, December 24, 2015

HUMAN DIGNITY DENIED AT CENTENNIAL PEAKS

Respect, Empathy and Personal Responsibility

A remark made at the nursing station while I witnessed a poor woman who had been starving for 20 hours while waiting for ECT encapsulates another problem. “Oh I know what you’re going through,” smiled the young woman at the counter, “I’m hungry too.“No, you do not”, was my remark. “You may be missing lunch. This patient feels like she is starving to death” (the actual wording I do not fully remember.) Taken as a whole, aside from the occasional rudeness, the staff was generally polite and friendly but not compassionate. The CEO of Centennial can rejoice that she  could not have found a more loyal set of employees who (from the very bottom to the top of the totem poll) will consistently stick to the rules and be less inclined to find solutions that satisfy patient and said rules and will be guaranteed to pass the buck, abstaining from any desire to take individual responsibility for the well-being of the human being standing before them. In the upper levels,
she can be confident that those staff will generally not answer patient questions nor let them finish speaking when they are making an important point. One high level person even told me, “I wish I were as compassionate and open as you” — this person’s favorite word to me otherwise was “denied.”

 Even a minor example shows a patent unwillingness to go the extra inch on the part of the staff I knew for a fact that there was some juice in the back room when I asked for some. But the young female insisted there was no juice. When I reminded her that I had been given said juice by another staff worker not long before, only then did she bother to look and indeed there was juice. I received no apology.

As an empath, I can entirely understand the stress of the nursing station. Moreover, in 1990 I spent over 100 hours volunteering in a Nursing home and I have served a patient advocate on numerous occasions, including when my beloved teacher John Strugnell was recovering from a stroke. I understand the hierarchy, sociology and anthropology involved. I know that the staff are ever concerned with safety and indeed are in fact concerned with patient well-being, up to a point. They have to make quick and sometimes cold decisions to keep things running smoothly and safely. They have to be very careful with the rules for all sorts of reasons, not simply to keep their jobs. For this reason, I do not blame the individual staff members so much as I blame the ethos of the institution which is thoroughly rotten.


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