Why Hospitals Should Treat You Like a Kid

New policies and amenities making hospitals more homelike.

ByABC News
April 5, 2012, 5:23 PM

April 6, 2012— -- Imagine lying in a hospital bed, afraid, stuck repeatedly with needles to draw blood for tests you don't understand. Next to you lies another patient -- in a bed so close that each of you hears everything the other has to go through.

This is the reality for many hospitalized adults in the U.S.

In a New York Times editorial, Dr. Perri Klass, professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University, laments this state of affairs and offers wisdom from the pediatric community to illustrate how small changes could make a big difference.

Among these changes, she suggests, are drawing blood with smaller needles and letting family members stay with patients in the hospital to allay the fear of being alone.

While Dr. Klass acknowledges that change takes time, she raises an important question: When will adult medicine catch up?

ABC News reached out to hospitals across the country to find out how they are working to improve patients' experiences. Some of what we heard was just what the doctor -- Dr. Klass, that is -- had ordered. Many institutions are now using smaller needles and tubes when they draw blood, both to improve comfort and conserve valuable blood for the patient.

The Baptist Hospital East in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, often uses smaller "butterfly" needles in the emergency room and intensive care unit. This is especially important when it comes to elderly patients with smaller veins, they said.

Dr. Matthew Weissman of the Ryan-NENA Community Health Center in New York takes his approach to drawing blood a step further. Not only does he tailor needle size to the patient, he tries to cut down on blood draws altogether by bundling laboratory tests together, and he makes sure to carefully explain every test that he runs.

In the ICU at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., they are using smaller needles to prevent unnecessary pain. And if a patient needs a loving hand to hold to get through the pinch, their relatives will be there morning, noon and night. The ICU has made limited visiting hours a thing of the past.

The hospital's administrators said in an email that they meet regularly with their partner facility, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, to discuss policies, procedures and what works best for patients.

And improving patients' experience is moving beyond simply instituting new hospital policies. Many hospitals are literally paving the way to let loved ones stay by a patient's side. New hospital construction is increasingly focused on patient privacy and accommodations for patients and their families.

At City of Hope, a cancer treatment facility in Duarte, Calif., patients helped guide construction of its new Helford Clinical Research Hospital. The intention was to ensure that the patient perspective was considered and to create a more "home-like" environment.

That's exactly the experience Hannah Komai, now 21, received when she underwent 11 months of chemotherapy for bone cancer at Helford in 2010 and 2011.

She had already lived through the fear and stress of watching her father undergo treatment for prostate cancer, and was petrified of what awaited her. Both her cancer and her father's are now in remission.

But she said her illness and the intensive chemotherapy regimen were much easier to endure because of the "second home" environment Helford offered.