Catastrophic Conditions at Herlev…
Catastrophic Conditions at Herlev Hospital Emergency Room
Try to avoid an accident in the greater Copenhagen area. If you get injured, you need to be lucky to survive the (non-)treatment at the Emergency Room.
But let me start with the dry facts of my accident and the subsequent treatment I received:
Monday, September 7, 2020, at 19:30 I had a bicycle accident in Kgs.Lyngby, part of Copenhagen:
As I overtook another cyclist, he suddenly pulled to the left and hit me. I crashed and fell with my left side towards a parked car. The crash blew the air out of my lung, I fainted briefly and had great pain on the left side of my chest and my left shoulder. I also hit my head, but was wearing a bicycle helmet, which absorbed the worst.
An ambulance took me to Herlev Hospital's emergency room, where I arrived approx. at 20:00. Here I was asked to sit down and wait for a nurse to come immediately. The subsequent events of the emergency room were a complete failure:
1. No one came to look after me. First after several hours an X-ray was taken. There was no doctor nor nurse who looked at my wounds before approx. 2:30 the next morning.
2. My wife arrived at 20:30 and was able to organize some painkillers for me after more than one hour of further waiting.
3. Likewise, it took my wife more than an hour to get some ice to cool my wounds. She had to beg for help several times before anything happened.
4. I was in so great pain that I could not sit any longer. I was dizzy and afraid of falling off the chair, so I had to lie down on the dirty floor in the waiting room. Other patients lent me their coat to pad my head, which hurt badly. My wife begged again several times that I could get a bed to lay down on, but first at about 24:00 I was assigned a stretcher where another patient had been lying just before.
5. I froze and had to cover myself with the dirty carpet lying on the stretcher. That was strictly against all Corona rules.
6. Approx. at 2:30 in the morning a nice younger doctor arrived who was clearly overworked and stressed. She walked out of the treatment room several times to ask some else for advice. Eventually, she concluded that I had broken a rib, beaten my shoulder off the joint, and had a concussion. In fact, I had broken two ribs.
7. No ultrasound or MRI examination was performed to see if there might be more internal wounds or bleeding. Nor if I have bleeding in my head.
8. The nurse gave me further painkillers and a sling for my arm. I got the advice to see my own doctor next night and during the night my wife was to wake me up at regular intervals in order to check whether I had symptoms of internal bleeding in my skull.
9. At 3:00 in the morning we were sent home and able to leave the hospital.
Some observations we made in the emergency room during that terrible night:
1. The staff do their best, but it is clear that there is a dramatic lack of staffing. Everybody was just running around without looking right or left.
2. The nurses and the young doctor with whom my wife talked were nice and friendly but were completely overstressed and overworked.
3. The staff and the other patients confirmed that it was a "normal" evening in the emergency room, no more patients than usual. Often it is worse.
4. The conditions at the Emergency Department that evening were heartbreaking. Here are some more examples:
a. A little boy of 8-10 years had broken his forearm, excruciating pain and had to wait until well past midnight before being looked after. He more or less collapsed in the arms of his parents
b. An elderly lady of approx. 80 years waited with a broken arm for longer than we did, without being offered anything to eat or drink. She was in Hypoglycemia and very hungry. She was shaking and hardly able to stand. We gave her the last piece of chocolate we had in our bag.
Later on, I had a very good telephone conversation with one of the directors of Herlev following up on my complaints. Genuinely nice, friendly, and understanding. He agreed that the conditions at the emergency room were unacceptable and that the hospital is in the process of implementing improvements. I hope and pray that it will succeed this time. The track record of the hospitals however is not exactly promising.
Background:
1. At 1 July 2013, the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet reported on chaotic conditions in the emergency department with the headline “Kaos på akutmodtagelse: Ventede i 16 timer” (“Chaos in the emergency room: I waited for 16 hours”). At this time the hospital promised improvement, which never came!
2. On 17 September 2020, Ekstra Bladet once again had to report about dramatic problems at Herlev Hospital's emergency department with the headline “Sygeplejersker går grædende hjem: 'Patientsikkerhed er helt væk'” ” (“Nurses go home crying: there is no safety for patients”) .
28 January 2021
Unprompted review
