Quotes & Sayings About Hospital Patients

You knew then that this was not any kind of hospital that cured, but a hospital that held, that kept their patients away from the rest of the world, a kind of ark that floated along full of life, but not participating in life ... These people no longer made progress. — Anne Spollen

I was not a good doctor, my studies had been too rapid, my hospital training too short, but there is not the slightest doubt that I was a successful doctor. What is the secret of success? To inspire confidence. What is confidence? ... I do not know, I only know that it cannot be acquired by book reading, nor by the bedside of our patients. It is a magic gift granted by birth-right to one man and denied to another. The doctor who possesses this gift can almost raise the dead — Axel Munthe

I don't doubt for a moment that the revolution will result in a nonracial society. I have just come from being a patient in Groote Schuur Hospital where they now have integrated wards. For the first time in my life, I have seen it working. The patients were mixed, the staff was mixed, and the medical officers were mixed; it was totally integrated. It was beautiful. White and black together. And it works. To me that is terribly exciting. — Helen Joseph

The USDHEW calculates that 7% of all patients suffer compensable injuries while hospitalized ... One out of every five patients admitted to a typical research hospital acquires an iatrogenic (Caused by the treatment process) disease, one case in thirty leading to death. Half of these episodes result from complications of drug therapy; amazingly, one in ten come from diagnostic procedures. — Ivan Illich

Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own. — Jacob M. Appel

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit. — Charles C. Mann

'The Who' created the Daltrey/Townshend Center at UCLA for teenage hospital patients with cancer. It's the only one of its kind. — Nolan Sotillo

The medical clown connects with patients in a way that is markedly different from the rest of their experience in the hospital. — Jeff Raz

Among frail, elderly patients, C. diff can be fatal in approximately 5-10%. Some patients with severe C. diff end up losing their colon and have a permanent bag on their side to catch bodily waste, via a procedure known as an ileostomy. — J. Thomas LaMont

Yes. Now, you might not want to become so friendly with your fellow patients on the floor." "Why not?" "That can distract people from the healing process." "How?" "This is a hospital. It's not a place to make friends. Friends are wonderful, but this place is about you and making you feel better." "But ... " I fidget. "I respect Humble. I respect Bobby. I have more respect for them after a day and a half than I do for most people ... in the world, really." "Just be careful of forming close relationships, Craig. Focus on yourself. — Ned Vizzini

We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age. — Thomas Szasz

Corunda Base Hospital itself continued to function on doctors, nurses, domestic staff, food preparers, and ancillary staff in the same old way, so that the patients lived (or died) in relative ignorance of the drama going on at an executive level. Indeed, it was a rare patient even knew that a hospital had executives. — Colleen McCullough

Did you ever hear the story of the man who walks past the mental hospital?" he said. "He can hear all the patients inside shouting, 'Thirteen! Thirteen! Thirteen!,' but the fence is too high for him to see what is going on. Then he spots a knothole in one of the planks. He looks through it, and bam - a stick pokes him in the eye, and he hears the inmates all shouting, 'Fourteen! Fourteen! Fourteen!'" He took a sip of his cocoa. "I mind my own business, Detectives. — James Patterson

Where patient needs are complex, we should provide greater support in the community so that patients can cut down on trips to the tertiary hospital. — Tony Tan

When the Russian delegate this summer indicated the Soviet Union's interest in sending medical equipment, Dr Shigeto went right away to see the delegate and settle the matter tactfully. He is careful to steer clear of the superficial swirl of political maneuvering, but never misses any opportunity to improve the capability of the A-bomb Hospital or to enhance concretely the welfare of the patients. In that sense, he sometimes refers to himself as a 'dirty handkerchief.' That is, he serves to filter political purposes out of relief efforts so that the effect on patients is purely and concretely humane. — Kenzaburo Oe

My dad was a physician. As a kid, I remember driving around with him on weekends so he could do his rounds at the hospital and talk to patients. We'd spend time in the car talking about what was going on with them, their stories. — Pierre Omidyar

Seeing what was needed in the hospital firsthand - someone needs to come in and just be with patients, without trying to take their blood or change the bedpan, and to give them human-to-human touch. — Colleen Saidman

Tissue gas was most common in bedsores - big, nasty ones on hospital patients, or on old people who never moved for weeks or months at a time. Gangrene was another possible source of the bacteria, and usually showed up in the same types of cases. It was possible that this body could have developed tissue gas in one of those ways if she'd been held in one place for months on end, without being allowed to move. — Dan Wells

Real faith, however, is required to endure this necessary but painful developmental process. As things unfold, sometimes in full view, let us be merciful with each other. We certainly do not criticize hospital patients amid intensive care for looking pale and preoccupied. Why then those recovering from surgery on their souls? No need for us to stare; those stitches will finally come out. And in this hospital, too, it is important for everyone to remember that the hospital chart is not the patient. Extending our mercy to someone need not wait upon our full understanding of their challenges! Empathy may not be appreciated or reciprocated, but empathy is never wasted. — Neal A. Maxwell

Eric approached the octagonal nurses' station, and a blonde nurse
looked up from her computer monitor, smiled, and pointed to
examining room D. Everybody recognized the hospital shrinks
from the bright red W on their lanyard IDs. The W stood for
Wright, the wing that contained the locked psych unit, but the
staff teased that W stood for Wackos. He'd heard all the jokes
How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?
The patients get better and leave. Eric told the best psychiatrist
jokes, though he never told the ones about psychiatrist's kids. He
didn't think those were funny. He lived those. — Lisa Scottoline

I am about to get involved with the biggest cancer hospital in Norway. They are building a fitness center to work with patients. I will be a consultant. — Grete Waitz

The virus transformed the hospital at Maridi into a morgue. As it jumped from bed to bed, killing patients left and right, doctors began to notice signs of mental derangement, psychosis, depersonalization, zombie-like behavior. Some of the dying stripped off their clothes and ran out of the hospital, naked and bleeding, and wandered through the streets of the town, seeking their homes, not seeming to know what had happened or how they had gotten into this condition. — Richard Preston

I guessed that he was one of those ambitious young physicians who more and more fill the profession, opportunists with a fashionable hoodlum image, openly hostile to their patients. My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race. — J.G. Ballard

You'd believe that a patient with hypertension, if you know you have hypertension or diabetes, you would take your drug every day. The compliance rate is more like 30% or 40%. Which means that 60% of patients don't take their drugs, and they actually go into these crises, end up in the hospital. — Patrick Soon-Shiong

How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?
The patients get better and leave. — Lisa Scottoline

Given how tedious and dull the hospital could be, I always expected hospital inpatients to be happy to see us. But they frequently had the opposite reaction. Patients cringed as soon as the door swung open to reveal, ta da! Physical Therapy! — Adele Levine

According to a brief filed by a consortium of hospital trade groups, "A market without subsidies will trigger a premium 'death spiral' in those states: With subsidies gone and premiums pushed higher, younger and healthier patients will likely drop coverage. Those that remain, paying the higher rates, are likely to be sicker and use more healthcare resources. That, in turn, will push rates for everyone in those states even higher, which will cause more to drop coverage, and so on. — Anonymous

The fact that the patients were complex human beings with a rich life beyond the hospital never really sank into the consciousness of the residents. Because they had no rich lives beyond the hospital, they assumed no one else did, either. In the end, what they lacked was not medical knowledge but ordinary life experience. — Michael Crichton

I know what the problem is, of course. The disorientation, the distraction, the difficulty focusing - all classic Phase One signs of deliria. But I don't care. If pneumonia felt this good I'd stand out in the snow in the winter with bare feet and no coat, or march into the hospital and kiss pneumonia patients — Lauren Oliver

Nearly everyone who is asked where they want to spend their final days says at home, surrounded by people they love and who love them. That's the consistent finding of surveys and, in my experience as a doctor, remains true when people become patients. Unfortunately, it's not the way things turn out. At present, just over one-fifth of Americans are at home when they die. Over 30 percent die in nursing homes, where, according to polls, virtually no one says they want to be. Hospitals remain the site of over 50 percent of deaths in most parts of the country, and nearly 40 percent of people who die in a hospital spend their last days in ICU, where they will likely be sedated or have their arms tied down so they will not pull out breathing tubes, intravenous lines, or catheters. Dying is hard, but it doesn't have to be this hard. — Ira Byock

Thoughts arise in the hostage's tormented brain. In the hospital, patients feel they are returning to childhood; in prison, they age. The gods blind themselves. — Elie Wiesel

That BIDMC did not bother to apply to the American Nurses Credentialing Center for recognition as a magnet hospital - one of Beth Israel's distinguishing features - demonstrates just how susceptible to disruption these arrangements are. Such fluctuations and changes could have ramifications not just for individual nurses' satisfaction and burnout rate but also for the quality of care patients receive. — Dana Beth Weinberg

Today, all patients accepted for treatment at St. Jude's are treated without regard for the family's ability to pay. Everything beyond what is covered by insurance is taken care of, and for those without insurance, all of the medical costs are absorbed by the hospital. — Marlo Thomas

HUMOR IS POWER." ~ Karyn Buxman, RN, neurohumorist Chapter 1 What's NOT So Funny About Nursing? 12 hour shifts . . . Doctors with attitude . . . Cranky co-workers . . . Frequent flyers . . . Non-compliant patients . . . Frustrated administrators . . . Antibiotic-resistant superbugs . . . Healthcare reform . . . Disorganized supply closets . . . Dwindling budgets . . . Increasing workloads . . . Bad hospital coffee. — Karyn Buxman

She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you're two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them. — John Irving

Hospitals in almost every country have reported outbreaks of C. diff, and the number and severity of cases continues to soar. In 2010 there were 350,000 cases of C. diff diagnosed in U.S. hospitals. That means that of 1,000 patients admitted to U.S hospitals, 10 will become infected with C. diff, most of them elderly. In some hospitals and nursing homes, as many as one in five patients is infected. — J. Thomas LaMont

In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to "mummy bags", subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Doctors frequently get it wrong. One out of five patients today is in the hospital because incorrect treatment by a physician put him or her there. — Andrew Saul

Ronkers was getting out of the elevator on the first floor when the intercom paged 'Dr Heart'. There was no Dr Heart at University Hospital. 'Dr Heart' meant someone's heart had stopped.
'Dr Heart?' the intercom asked sweetly. 'Please come to 304 ... '
Any doctor in the hospital was supposed to hurry to that room. There was an unwritten rule that you looked around and made a slow move to the nearest elevator, hoping another doctor would beat you to the patient. Ronkers hesitated, letting the elevator door close. He pushed the button again, but the elevator was already moving up.
'Dr Heart, room 304,' the intercom said calmly. It was better than urgently crying, 'A doctor! Any doctor to room 304! Oh my God, hurry!' That might disturb the other patients and the visitors. — John Irving

The English, who look on stoically as national health hospitals in run-down metropolitan areas close their wards through lack of support and patients spend time on trolleys in corridors, are comforted by the knowledge that wounded hedgehogs are tenderly cared for in a hedgehog hospital. — Antony Miall

Our society has tried to make death invisible, thinking that if we ignore it long enough it will go away. Often we as family and loved ones are so afraid of death that even mentioning the word to terminal patients is taboo. We think the dying are oblivious to what is happening to them. Sadly, a dying person frequently feels afraid to bring it up him or herself. When I enter a hospital room I often hear a sigh of relief. At last, someone is here to help the family come to terms with what is playing out before them. Death has too long been the elephant in the living room, while everyone awkwardly discusses the weather. — Megory Anderson

Patients can often be discharged from hospital, then re-admitted a few days later with complications. — Chris Toumazou

If you think about how healthcare is delivered, it's on an ad hoc basis. Someone comes into a hospital, someone comes into a pharmacy, someone comes into a doctor. But beyond those touchpoints, the patients are on their own. There's no real continuity of care. — Chris Viehbacher

So Medicare decided to pay hospitals like ours for internship and
residency training programs, get it? It's a win-win, as they say - the hospital
gets patients cared for by interns and residents around the clock,people like us who live on site, and whose stipend is a bloody fraction of what the hospital would pay full-time physicians. And Medicare delivers health care to the poor. — Abraham Verghese

Consider the case of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Its elderly residents have unusually low end-of-life hospital costs. During their last six months, according to Medicare data, they spend half as many days in the hospital as the national average, and there's no sign that doctors or patients are halting care prematurely. Despite average rates of obesity and smoking, their life expectancy outpaces the national mean by a year. — Atul Gawande

The hospital will never be healthy for patients if it's not a healthy environment for nurses, where their voices are heard and where they can care for their patients and use the full extent of their knowledge, abilities, and skills. After all, hospitals today have become one big intensive care unit: all patients need intensive caring. — Tilda Shalof

Visions and voices and fear and despair cannot be captured by CT scan or measured in the amplitude of EKG waves. Try as we might, we simply cannot predict which of our patients will kill themselves, which will murder their children, and which will leave the hospital healed, never to return. — Christine Montross

They also bring to mind what sometimes seems to be a rapt predilection of small but influential cults of intellectuals or esthetes for what is generally regarded as perverse dispirited or distastefully unintelligible. The award of a Nobel Prize in literature to Andre Gide who in his work fervently and openly insists that pederasty is the superior and preferable way of life for adolescent boys furnishes a memorable example of such judgments. Renowned critics and some professors in our best universities reverently acclaim as the superlative expression of genius James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake a 628page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic patients on the back wards of any state hospital. — Hervey M. Cleckley

He spent two years running a hospital for Chai." Molly put her arm around the younger woman. "Which was the equivalent of working the ER in a city like New York or Chicago. He saved a lot of lives." She made sure Max was paying attention, too. "And before you say, 'Yeah, of drug runners, killers, and thieves,' you should also know that his patients were just regular people who worked for Chai because he was the only steady employer in the area. Or because they knew they'd end up in some mass grave if they refused his offer of employment. Before Grady came in, if they were injured in some battle with a rival gang, they were just left for dead."
Jones looked up to find Max watching him as he sterilized a particularly sharp knife. "Me and Jesus," he said. "So much alike, people often get us confused. — Suzanne Brockmann

It's easier to hang out with the patients in the indoor garden, with its sunlight and picnic tables. Easier to forget that someone's ill when you're not surrounded by the antiseptic reek of hospital-issue debris. — Corrine Jackson

I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients. — Oscar Levant

Testing stools for C. diff in patients after they have finished their Flagyl or Vanco for 10 days and after their bowel movements have returned to normal (that is, formed and not watery) is a waste of time and money, and is not helpful to the doctor or patient. — J. Thomas LaMont

Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital beds, there are few options. — Thomas R. Insel

Safe care saves lives and saves money. Adverse events like high levels of infection, blood clots or falls in hospital, emergency readmissions and pressure sores cost the NHS billions of pounds every year. There is a serious human cost, too, with patients ending up injured, or even dead. Most are avoidable with the right care. — Andrew Lansley

I wish I could run away," Rudger told Jersey as they both rushed in and out of various patients' rooms, darting around like little ants. "I can't leave and be on my own though, not right now, anyway."
"Why?" asked Jersey, waving her flashlight in mid-air.
Rudger froze for a second, a regretful haze emanating from his eyes. "It'd break her heart if I left."
"Ain't that normal? For parents to have mixed feelings about their kids growin' up?"
"Not for me, it isn't."
Jersey made a pitying face in his direction. "So, you wanna keep bein' towed around with your mom, livin' in a gross town like Danvers?"
"Is there a choice?"
"Yeah, there sure is. You can run away and try to be a whole person before it's too late, or you can live with mommy dearest forever and turn into Norman Bates. — Rebecca McNutt

I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author. — Robert Benchley

You're right. Many nurses nowadays don't like doing the things that nurses used to have to do. Changing sheets and collecting bedpans - that sort of thing. Nursing has moved on, Bertie.'
Bertie was puzzled. 'But if they don't do that,' he said, 'then who does? Do people have to tuck themselves into bed when they're in hospital?'
Irene was amused by this and raised her eyes again. 'Dear Bertie, no, not at all. They have other people now to do that sort of thing. There are other wome ... people who do that.' 'So they aren't nurses, Mummy?' asked Bertie. Irene waved a hand vaguely. 'No. They call them care assistants, or something like that. It's very important work.' 'So what do the nurses do then, Mummy? If they have somebody else to take the bedpans to the patients, what's left for the nurses to do? Do they do the things that doctors do? Can nurses take your tonsils out?' 'I think they'd like to,' said Irene. — Alexander McCall Smith

He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly - it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply-informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy. — George Eliot

A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station - all noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquillizers substitute for quietness. — Herbert M. Shelton

The burn unit is often the most distant wing of a hospital, because burn victims are so susceptible to infection that they must be kept away from other patients. More important, perhaps, is that the placement minimizes the chance of visitors stumbling across a Kentucky Fried Human. — Andrew Davidson

I'm training to become a giggle doctor. It's a kind of hospital clown who changes the atmosphere on the ward and helps recovery. It's about making patients laugh but also much more. — Nina Conti

Most patients enter a doctor's office or hospital as if it were a Mayan temple, representing an ancient and mysterious culture with no language in common with the visitor. — Tom Brokaw

Food wasn't one of the amenities at Cooper, the five-hundred-bed hospital on which millions of poor people depended. Nor was medicine. "Out of stock today" was the nurses' official explanation. Plundered and resold out of supply cabinets was an unofficial one. What patients needed, families had to buy on the street and bring in. — Katherine Boo

He pretended they were someone else's parents or recently released patients from a mental hospital who had arbitrarily chosen to root for him. Mainly, he figured they were a little goofy, but that was okay. — Paul Levine

This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women.8 Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital. Furthermore, the textbook said, "There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology." My patients with incest histories were hardly free of "subsequent psychopathology" - they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that "such incestuous activity diminishes the subject's chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world."9 — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Some older or very ill patients may not be suitable candidates for fecal transfer. Colonoscopy is an invasive procedure, especially for those patients who are too ill with other conditions like cancer, heart failure, dialysis, or Alzheimer's. — J. Thomas LaMont

Why indeed should we perpetually be thinking whether things are good for us, as if we were patients lying in a hospital? — Henry James

hospital. You know they gave me male nurses on purpose." "Of course they did. They didn't want any of their female nurses shirking their duties to the other patients to take care of you." Levi Spencer was one of the most, if not the most, eligible bachelors in Las Vegas. He was rich, for one thing, and couldn't help being charming any more than he could help his gorgeous - according to Joe's own wife - blue eyes, dark hair or I'm-trouble-and-you'll-love-every-minute-of-it grin. "You're mostly bored," Joe said. "None of my friends came to visit me in the hospital." Joe sighed. He wasn't sure that Levi actually — Erin Nicholas

Other ex-lawyers become advocates in entirely different fields. Jen Atkins went from law to nursing, spending several years at home in between careers. As a cardiology nurse at Boston Children's Hospital, she now advocates for the youngest patients at a critical time. One of her long-term goals is to become an advocate for improving health care on a national level. Counseling — Liz Brown

People tend to forget they are patients. Once they leave the doctor's office or the hospital, they simply put it out of their minds. But you are all permanent patients, like it or not. I am the doctor, you the patient. Doctor doesn't cease being doctor at close of day. Neither should patient. People expect doctor to go about things with the utmost seriousness, skill and experience. But what about patient? How professional is he? — Don DeLillo

"Religion" can no more be equated with what goes on in churches than "education" can be reduced to what happens in schools or "health care" restricted to what doctors do to patients in clinics. The vast majority of healing and learning goes on among parents and children and families and friends, far from the portals of any school or hospital. The same is true for religion. It is going on around us all the time. Religion is larger and more pervasive than churches. — Harvey Cox

Women and men in scrubs swept into the room and checked the monitors and the bags. They strode out, nodded at the quartet slumped in chairs against the wall, and scuffed down the hall. Nurses changed shifts, moved the life of the place along while patients and visitors waited frozen, locked into little boxes of concern and fear.
The strange hours of the pre-dawn arrived, when the hospital hushed even as the business of sickness and death ground on. — Scott Archer Jones

We run Aravind like McDonald's," he explained, "clean and organized, with every process known and understood so that we get maximum efficiency. Two-thirds of the patients pay nothing or nearly nothing, and yet the hospital is consistently profitable - and growing. — Jacqueline Novogratz

In a field hospital, some ten kilometres behind the lines, Marius lay dying. For three days he had been dying and it was disturbing to the other patients. — Ellen N. La Motte

When patients are admitted to hospital for elective surgery or non-urgent conditions, their vital signs are only monitored every four hours, unless they have been identified as being at high risk of deterioration. — Chris Toumazou

One might have complained about the soot and ashes or about the pipes and curtain rods that hung crazily from the ceiling, but patients never lived in a hospital ward so nearly free of bacteria as this one that was sterilized by fire. — Michihiko Hachiya

Ever since Katrina, there has been a proliferation of efforts at the state level and among hospital administrators to come up with guidelines that would help professionals stuck in a situation like this to prioritize patients. These are questions of values much more than they are of medicine or nursing. They're the province of everybody. — Sheri Fink

At 1.30 she left the hospital to do some shopping. Both men were sound asleep. Gentle afternoon sunlight flooded the room, and I felt as though I might drift off at any moment perching on my stool. Yellow and white chrysanthemums in a vase on the table by the window reminded people it was autumn. In the air floated the sweet smell of boiled fish left over from lunch. The nurses continued to clip-clop up and down the hall, talking to each other in clear, penetrating voices. They would peep into the room now and then and flash me a smile when they saw that both patients were sleeping. I wished I had something to read, but there were no books or magazines or newspapers in the room, just a calendar on the wall. — Haruki Murakami