Madison Memorial Hospital will hold focus groups in response to an ER complaint on Facebook
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REXBURG – After seeing online complaints of inattention in the emergency room, Madison Memorial Hospital wants to do better.
The hospital will soon hold focus groups to address complaints about response times in the ER after a Facebook post garnered almost 200 comments and 153 reactions, detailing negative experiences.
Cassidy Chun posted about her grandfather’s experience in the ER in the Life in Rexburg Facebook group, which has 16,100 members. According to the Facebook post, Chun’s mother, Becky Sellers, took him to the ER after his hands got crushed.
Chun says her grandfather sat in the ER waiting room for almost two hours before being seen. When Chun’s grandfather was seen, Sellers was shocked to recognize the doctor as a man who had been sitting at the nurse’s station while they waited.
Ultimately, the ER doctor never examined Chun’s grandfather. Sellers says he referred the patient to a specialist in Idaho Falls.
“This is about a patient that was in excruciating pain, shock and bleeding for almost two hours in the ER, with a doctor sitting right there, and doing absolutely nothing about it,” Sellers said. “Even after repeatedly being asked by the nurse and ourselves, he never even looked at him. The nurse did. The X-ray technicians did.”
The post garnered 192 comments, many of which echoed the sentiments of the original post. After seeing Chun’s Facebook post, Jess Goudy, the communications strategist at Madisonhealth, posted a response to the Facebook group.
Shortly after Goudy made the post, the hospital contacted Chun and asked if she would like to be part of an ER focus group.
Doug McBride, the executive director for business development at Madison Memorial Hospital, says the feedback is helpful because they don’t receive it often.
When patients come in, they receive a patient packet containing information about the patient support hotline, where patients can submit complaints. The hospital’s quality team has conducted research on the ER department, and they found that less than 1% of patients have submitted complaints with the ER department.
“There’s obviously a disconnect from people feeling or being able to voice some concerns or some issues about the care they received,” McBride said. “So that was one of the biggest things that alerted us to the idea we need to be looking at this.”
The hospital will have multiple focus groups to study how they can improve the ER. McBride says they will start sending out focus group invitations next week.
“It is really a high intense area in any hospital, and so anything we can find out that we might be able to support them and give those resources to assist in that area is really what we’re hoping to achieve,” McBride said.
Additionally, members of administration, the public relations team and the quality team will attend, so they can make the appropriate changes quickly.
“We’ll really have decision makers and people who can implement change for whatever we find out,” McBride said.
Outside of the ER, Chun and Sellers have had positive experiences at the hospital, and they just want protocols to change so patients receive the attention they need.
“I actually really like the hospital,” Sellers said. “Our only problems we’ve ever had is just the attention of getting that initial needs met when we enter the emergency room and the understanding that to us, this is an emergency and if we wanted to wait, we’d go to the doctor’s office.”
Madison Memorial Hospital wants to gain the community’s trust, and is willing to earn it.
“We love our community,” McBride said. “It’s been a great, great area. It’s been supporting us for so long and we just have some good abilities and strengths here and I think if we work together, we can work through any of these issues.”
To submit patient feedback, call Madison Memorial Hospital’s patient support hotline at 208-359-9812.