Not everyone cares about your health

Re: Transitions between health providers are painful points for Ontario patients, ombudsman reports, Nov. 10. David Reevely’s stories of patient and hospital issues leading to surgery cancellations resonate with me.

After my second knee replacement in April 2016, I had a postsurgical infection a month later. I spent 26 hours in the ER waiting for an open operating room. The care in the ER and the subsequent seven days in hospital, in a private isolation room, were first-rate.

But less than 12 hours after I was brought up from recovery to my room, a lady from the business office came to see me, bypassing the floor nursing manager. As I was still in a postsurgical fog, she told me I had to sign papers for my stay in that private room because “who was going to pay?”

I have semi-private coverage so I was told not to worry, that there would be no problem: “Just sign this.” This low-level functionary had no interest in why I was there. The problem was, as she said, “who is going to pay.”

This is exactly what the hospital ombudsman has to deal with. Vulnerable people before and after surgery are being victimized repeatedly. When a nurse came in as she was leaving, this lady beat it out the door faster than an Olympic runner. The nurse got the floor manager, who said I was not to pay: The surgeon had ordered an isolation room because of in-hospital infection.

Yet I continued to get bills for that stay until this summer. Finally, after repeatedly arguing with the business office at the Ottawa Hospital to check my in-patient record, my surgeon did what he had done already — which was to instruct the business office to stop this repeated billing.

There are people in the hospital system who want to serve patients, and there are functionaries as described here. I hope these stories do something to put an end to their bad practices. Ron Grossman, Blackburn