The surgical patients are divided into two units. Two or three surgeons are part of a unit, and each patient is assigned to either Unit 1 or Unit 2, depending on who performed their surgery. The patients are not sorted by unit in the wards, and I don’t yet understand how the rounding surgeons know which patients they need to see. There is no master list of patients, as far as I can tell. Rounds occur only Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, which means these are the only days a surgeon examines the patients and updates their plan of care. Two nurses are responsible for fifty patients. Things get missed.
Walking into the women’s surgical floor this morning, we passed a grey-haired woman curled on her side in bed. “Is that patient on our unit?” Jon asked the nurse. Instead of answering, she felt for a pulse. The patient was dead. A woman I assumed was her guardian sat on the adjacent bed weeping quietly. The nurse put a screen in front of the dead woman’s bed and we continued rounds.