What should we do?

[Amanda]

People keep asking me: What should we do to FIX the medical system? Do you have any ideas from your own experience?

[Kathie]

Physicians should have to document why they make certain decisions for individual patients. I worked as an RN for 20 years on a surgical floor and we had surgeons that routinely treated fevers of 101 and above with a battery of expensive tests followed with a trio of potent antibiotics that had serious side effects. Most of the time, the patients were not doing enough deep breathing ( usually splinting due to incisional pain or narcotics). They needed to get up, decrease opoids, cough and deep breath plus move gas.
We also wasted so much extra "stuff" that was added to kits used for catheter placement and other procedures.
It would all be thrown away since it was contaminated once opened.
Just these two suggestions could save so much money. Hospital workers probably could offer many suggestions to help with costs from housekeeping to upper management. Would the system benefit from the savings? Perhaps that is the question.