Healthcare Interview – Paul Sherwood, former Hospital Administrator

After researching, collecting, analyzing, and telling stories with large sets of healthcare data, I decided I wanted to move towards a more personal based exploration of the healthcare system. I was also inspired by this NY Times interactive story telling piece.

I’ve been interviewing people who work in the industry in various capacities and asking them to tell me stories. Paul Sherwood spent several decades running hospitals, and being my Dad, was an easy person to get in touch with. Here are some stories he told.

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Story 1 The Emergency!

One of the funnier incidents…

Received a call from the Engineering Department – also called Maintenance.  These guys basically fixed anything that broke in the hospital – in the plant…so not medical equipment but the building and any of the building services.  They’d also do minor mods to the building.

Anyway, had a call from the Chief Engineer who asked to see me…said it was an emergency. “Come on” of course!

Upon arrival he presents me with a standard work request he’d just received from the Emergency Department. The nurses needed one of the guys to come to the ER with a pair of plyers to pull down a patients trouser zipper in which he’d caught his penis!!

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Story 2 The Operating Room

The hospital industry supports an organization called The Joint Commission on Healthcare Accreditation” colloquially known as the “JCAHO”. The JCAHO would visit each fully accredited hospital every three years and conduct a 3-5 day scrutiny of everything the hospital did from its personnel policies to its quality assurance surveillance over medical matters to financial management to administrative leadership systems to management of the medical staff’s credentials to practice. If you failed to received full accreditation but only received contingent or partial accreditation the surveyors might return in 12 or 18 months for an interim survey.

A survey is an immense project and preparation normally takes a full year. Only after several cycles can a hospital hope to engender a culture that conducted all day-to-day operations as though every day was a day when the surveyors would be in the department.

Part of the year-long preparation involved training the various patient care teams in what the surveyors would be looking for in individuals’ knowledge bases during the team interview. One cycle I was leading a training session for the surgical staff. One of the JCAHO standards requires that every patient being anesthetized be asked, prior to anesthesia, if he’d used any recreational drugs in the week preceding surgery. The concern is that use of recreational drugs can potentiate or modify the reaction of the anesthetic in the body. After the review session was completed we were sitting around talking and I happened to ask the anesthesiology staff what percentage of patients answered in the affirmative. Their answer, with no hesitation, was “easily 75%”  I was floored!!

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Story 3 The Patient

Patients are why all of us are in the business. We want to help. Each individual on the hospital team makes his or her own contribution to the effort. But some patients require greater effort than others.

One day a nurse showed up at my office asking help with a patient. It seemed her staff had been dealing with this man for quite some time and had come to the end of their patience. I agreed to go see him but he had followed her down to my office (in his wheelchair) and showed himself right in and started yelling with no preamble.

I let him go on as long as he wanted. When he finally started to wind down I began a conversation with him over his expectations and our failures thereto. (What I understood immediately was that this patient was afraid of his pending death). We talked for about the problems for over an hour after which I promised to see what I could do but promised nothing specific.

The next day I went to the nurse who had sought my help and told her what I thought and what I intended. After that, each day, I went to his bedside to see how things were going. Would you believe that absolutely nothing else wrong ever happened??? After several days of calm, one morning, I found he had died during the night. I attended his funeral with his widowed wife with whom I’d become friends along the way.