Seeking advice from people who work in hospitals

Laura Rua

Hi,

This is my first post, so I hope I’m in the right place!

I’m writing a fictional story, and was hoping for some advice from people who work, or have worked, in hospitals in order to get my details right. This part of the story is set in St Vincent’s, so if you work there all the better!

Basically, at one point of the story, some people need to sneak their friend who, appears to be in a coma, out of the hospital where he is being cared for. This has thrown up a number of questions for me. For example:

- What ward should he be in? At this point, he will have been in the hospital for less than 24 hours.
- Are coma patients hooked up to those heart monitors that beep? If this was removed, would it alert the staff? Would other tubes etc need to be removed also?
- Have you ever come across patients being “sneaked out”? Not coma patients obviously, but perhaps people taking their family members out for a smoke etc? What happened?

Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Laura

stretch00

Hi Laura,

I'll fill in some of the blanks. It would be rather odd from a medical perspective for a patient to just happen to be in a coma and be well enough to sneak them out of hospital. It is possible that as a result of an injury or acute medical condition that someone would be placed in an induced coma, where they are put there and kept there using a careful balance of medications and nutrients and monitored by both invasive technology and non invasive technology. Nigh on impossible to sneak them out without killing them. The same would be largely true of someone who through injury or medical cause was in a non induced coma.

The patient would be admitted to an intensivist area of the hospital, normally an ICU or CCU depending on cause of coma, with a possible transfer to a HDU area if it was to become a longterm issue such as a PVS. You would be better to change the wards, as the wards in SVUH have names and designations so they might not be too pleased with using the real ward name.

As a result of all the monitoring and therapeutic equipment, in essence they would beep if you tried to sneak them out, most likely they would be on a telemetry monitor so this displays at or near a designated station from which a group of patients can be monitored, and any change would be noticed very quickly.

Yes ambulatory and not quite so ambulatory patients are regularily sneaked out of wards and ED's for a smoke, I can remeber in years gone by meeting patients complete with IV fluids in their pyjamas in a pub not a stones throw from SVUH, and that's not a myth :-)

Now the million dollar question, could you sneak out a pt such as you describe ? With the right means training, confidence and competence, the correct manner of transport and a bit of bottle, absolutely. Completely hypothetically of course.............:D

Laura Rua

Thanks stretch00- that's a huge help. And it's a relief to know that there is, however slight, a possibility of actually smuggling someone out so the story won't be completely unbelievable!

Thanks a million!