Man speaks about bad experience with local hospital
HENRY COUNTY, Tenn. — A local man shared his challenging experience trying to make sure his friend got treated in a local ER.
David, a Paris resident, brought his friend to the Henry County Medical Center on Monday around 11:30 p.m.
According to David, his friend was extremely sick, running a fever, in a lot of pain, and vomiting. After going through triage, the pair were put into a small room with a single recliner.
After hours of waiting, nurses performing multiple tests, and David repeatedly asking for a room with a bed in it, he was told they would only be there for a few more minutes, so a bed wasn’t necessary.
When a few more minutes became a few hours in the small room, he used his smartphone to video the situation for a Facebook post.
In the video, it appears the doctor was asleep at a nurses station and clearly showed rooms available with beds in them. David approached a nurse who was on her personal phone and told her the doctor was asleep.
The nurse got the doctor and he then discharged the patient.
“I’d like to see this emergency room turned around because I really thought during this time, had there been a car wreck or something and people come in with their bodies mangled, who was going to be there to take care of them? The sleeping doctor, one nurse? Totally understaffed. Totally incompetent. It’s a dangerous situation to be in,” David said.
We reached out to the Henry County Medical Center to get their response to the video and the Facebook post.
“Don’t know why that patient wasn’t moved to a regular room, so we’ve had discussions with the ER team and the ER medical director and the president of the ER group. We’ve had kind of all hands on deck trying to figure out why that happened and really just discouraged and frustrated that the entire situation happened,” said John Tucker, the CEO of the Henry County Medical Center.
When asked why the doctor was possibly sleeping at a nurses station, Tucker responded.
“I don’t think it’s uncommon for physicians to go to a sleep room and lie down. But I haven’t ever been familiar with them kind of resting at the nurses station, or the physicians work station. So that’s, obviously, bad optics,” Tucker said. “In all my years of working, in over 30 years of public work, I feel like if I was sleeping on the job or other employees were sleeping on the job, we would be fired.”
What is the Henry County Medical Center doing to avoid this type incident?
“So I think we are all, top to bottom, redoubling our efforts to improve care in our emergency department and attentiveness of care. More importantly, in our emergency department,” Tucker said.
Tucker did say that disciplinary action will be taken against the staff. However, he did not disclose what that action would be.
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