There are signs everywhere in the medical clinic stating that due to H1N1, they no longer have magazines available, you are to remove any brochures you read, you need a mask if you’re going to cough, and you’re expected to use hand sanitizer when you approach the reception area to “protect yourself and our staff”. All seemingly reasonable precautions, until you actually approach the reception area.
No hand sanitizer visible behind the counter, no staff wearing masks, Plexiglas window all the way open with the receptionist with hands all over your health card and paperwork is hacking up a lung, sniffling, sneezing, and blowing her nose all over the place! Then she starts doing a mailout to patients about their new waiting room rules –and she’s LICKING the envelopes!
Seriously?
They don’t allow you to call in prescrition refills, so I am stuck in this freaking Petri Dish getting covered in Lung Butter until my overworked Doctor can come out of a room with a visibly ill guy, not wash his hands, and hand me a germ-laden prescription sheet…
—Bathing in Purell from now on
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2009.
yes, sanitize your life… that’s going to solve the problem.
while I find the hospital regulations a little overbearing throughout this ‘epidemic’ I can’t help but remember that the children and elderly are there most often so I can see the need…
You do realize OP, that a virus can only live on a surface for a short period of time.
I’ve seen how a lack of common sense in the medical profession affects patient health. Hospitalized for an emergency procedure in Toronto during the SARS outbreak, I was aghast when a nurse asked to borrow some of my toothpaste for a patient who had none, to which I agreed thinking she would squeeze some into a little medication cup or something but she applied it directly to that patient’s toothbrush!!! When I was able to get out of bed after a couple of days to visit the washroom my socks stuck to the floor!!! This was because some incontinent room-mates did not successfully make it the toilet in time. It took over 24 hours for cleaning staff to clean that floor after I brought it to staff’s attention. And they held an inquiry to try to discover how the 2nd outbreak occured!
I was one of the lucky ones, the elderly lady in the bed next to me and her daughter who visited both got SARS and died! Halfway through my stay, nurses told patients that they were relaxing their rules a little and patients no longer had to wear facemasks. I demanded a fresh one on a regular basis and continued to wear one until I was discharged, a move that likely saved me from the second outbreak and certain death.
sorry op, ive been in lineup after lineup with hacking sniffling people lately quite often, im not sick. havent even gotten so much as the common cold. Stop being such a whiney germaphobe. If you are so bloody concerned about it, put yourself up in a bubble. otherwise, take the germs, let your body build its immunity and shut the fuck up already.
Seems to me the OP is bitching more about the fact that they want the patients to take precautions, but don’t require their staff to do so… That’s what *I* got, anyway…