Specialist Hospital are not that Special After all

When you hear people say they are going to a specialist hospital for treatment you might think they are going to a place with top notch medical care and treatment. A place where everything is easier and smooth sailing, a place where you get the best of everything a medical facility can boast of. However, the reality is often quite different from what the name suggest.

Specialist hospitals are nothing much better than the local private hospitals in terms of handling patients and treatment administration. One would think that going to a specialist hospital would guarantee better outcome but from my experience it's even the worse. You would think everything would be easier there because there are a lot of doctors but the coordination between departments is just too poor. And the reception is too crowded for a specialist hospital.

I mean, for a specialist hospital, you would expect better organization but all incoming patients are packed together in a tiny hall regardless of what their ailments are and the department they need to visit. It's a kind of hell staying in a crowded waiting area not minding if any of the patient beside you have a contagious disease or not.

The only thing that meets the specialist hospital standard in my opinion are the structures and the technology they have in place because everything is digitalized. No manual record keeping or carrying of file from one department to another which is good. But the positioning of the departments is another thing that makes it too unspecialized. The departments are scattered all over the place that is as large as a village and it takes forever just to find where you are going.

After getting attendance number you have to walk over two miles to find the payment section to pay for your registration card and then walk back to join the crowd in the waiting hall again. Then you are called to go for your tests moving from one office to another and finally to the doctor's office where you wait again for your turn.

You would think that getting to the doctor's office would be the end of your stress but it's just the beginning of another round of journeying within the hospital. The doctor would not give you anything after consultation, but only tell you to go to where you have to do an advance test or go to the pharmacy. These departments are not close to each other and some people even use transportation to move between departments. That's to tell you how far apart the facilities are situated.

Meanwhile, when you get to the place for your advance test you have to do a fresh registration, and then travel back to the payment section to pay for the tests, and then return to the testing department to get your appointment date which might be weeks away. It doesn't matter if you came from a far place or if you urgently need medical treatment.

Being a specialist hospital you would think that they would have all kinds of medicine stocked in their pharmacy, but they don't have any meaningful drugs only common paracetamol and other emergency drugs you would find there. Whereas you thought you were going to collect your prescribed medicine from the pharmacy, you end up being given the prescription to take home and get the medicine anywhere you can.

It was a hell of experience going to that hospital yesterday and the worse is that I still have to go back tomorrow to complete my tests and get the results to know what is wrong with me and get proper treatment. My legs are still aching from all the walking I did yesterday, and I dread having to go through the same thing again tomorrow. If I have my way, I might collect the results and take it to a hospital in my city to undergo the treatment.

Everything is just so stressful, having to travel such a long distance only to be shuffled around from one department to another without any proper coordination or patient care. The whole experience made me question if visiting specialist hospital is worth the hassle. The cost is not even cheaper as expected and the treatment outcome is not guaranteed to be better than what you would get from a local hospital.

If not for the tests that I have already paid for, I would have cancelled my appointment and attend a private hospital in my city. At least there are good private hospitals with qualified doctors here in my city.