Good Samaritan Hospital

Reviews 3

EL

Elyse Barnett

If it is life & death, or if you need the best Emergency Room physicians & nurses, Good Samaratin still is the place. However, if you do not arrive by ambulance you will spend 10 hours in ED, 90 min, to see RN (Triage; contact, pulse, BP), three hours to see MD, & up to 10 hours for a treatment room (MD orders for your care are completed). I doubt I would be alive without the exceptional team at Good Samaratin in 2014, & as a former ER nurse, I know it was “the impossible save.” I will be researching new urgent care centers, as walk-in ED department with only 3 exam rooms means waiting 10 hr. with miserable RNs sharing frustration. Identifying myself as former RN, I learned the ER has only three rooms for walk-in patients. Only patients may sit, so I counted 24 waiting. Simple math tells us it would be more than 10 hours for patiens to be seen, if you believe it is possible to be admitted to an ER bed, & treated in one hour, & no new walk-in patients arrive. Kristen continues to tell patients they should not be at the ER. A new immigrant, a Syrian physician tells triage her "patient" needs urgent hydration before sitting with her ill husband while he chugs 16 onces of fluid, & we see PDA non-stop until he is brought in for treatment before the other waiting patients. As I listened to patients reporting high fever, HA, GI symptoms I left without treatment, fearing a second pneumonia (it would have been + 1 hr. to wait for discharge without treatment). The over-flow waiting room in the ED might be better utilized if it were set up to provide additional private areas, to help the team. As it is now, a second triage RN works in the waiting area. Every so often, the door opens, a staff member comes out shouting, "Mr. X I need to take you to X-Ray" & "Mrs. Y, did you get your blood work completed?" Meanwhile, the PA on my right was giving a patient Percocet & nausea medication, while another MD was kneeling by her patient to review the results of a MRI. If you pay your copay at registration, you receive a 20% discount, but my co-pay did not appear on the screen, so ask. Before you pay any "co-pay" for a hospital admission, you need to check with your insurance company. I was billed the maximum out of pocket charges for my hospital stay, when I owed 1/3 of the amount, & over-billing amount not returned. No update on the 5k to visit the wound care clinic, & see an ED physician working on an hourly basis who had less knowledge about wound care than myself! The brillant & skilled surgeon heading the clinic, did tell me insurance will not cover the cost of expensive wound care products in a private office, & he arranged to get pharm samples for me to help with cost. Once Stanford opens the satellite clinic down the street from Good Samaratin, the wound care clinic is doomed if it continues the practice of padding the bills. If the clinic is billing 5k for a single visit, the patient deserves to see a surgeon. Good Samaritan continues to have the best & brightest physicians, & now the NICU nurses remain at the bedside, a huge improvement in the quality of care. It is easy to understand why the walk-in ED RN are miserable, cross, a huge contrast from ED RN caring for serious cases. A supervisor needs to establish a protocol for all febrile patients, &/or flu patinets to put on a mask at arrival. As a PhD medical anthropologist, I do not see an easy solution for facilitating care in a walk-in ER with only THREE treatment rooms; It may be time to post a large sign in the walk-in ER to list # of patients waiting (i.e., 24) for 3 rooms, & list newly opened urgent cares.

MA

Marco Paganini

Id rate Good Sam ZERO stars if I could. In short: service is bad and it cost 7x (yes, seven times) more than the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Read on for details. A few weeks ago, our daughter had a minor accident affecting her toe and we decided to take her to the urgent care unit to make sure everything was ok. Since Good Sam is closer to home, we went there instead of our usual location (PAMF in Palo Alto). We immediately noticed that this place does not have a dedicated urgent care unit for kids; by bringing your children here, youll be exposing them to sick adults. After a considerable wait, they took an "extremity X-ray" to determine if something was fractured, and after that we had to wait 1h30m to receive the results. Fortunately nothing broken, but the best part was yet to come. Fast forward a few weeks in time and we receive the bill from Good sam: They charged us $1126 for a five-minute "extremities X-ray" and $1948 for the consultation itself for a total of $3074!!! Even with our health insurance, this resulted in a $300+ out of pocket bill. For comparison purposes, last year, our son broke his arm. We took him to the Palo Alto medical foundation where we waited a short amount of time for our consultation. Unlike Good Sam, PAMF has a dedicated urgent care unit for kids. The consultation there was $320 and the X-ray $140. This resulted in a total of $460 with a $0 out of pocket. This means that Good Sam charged us SEVEN TIMES more than PAMF to do the same work with much worse service. We are fortunate to have health insurance, but still, our part in Good Sam was almost the total charged by PAMF a few months ago. This is simply outrageous. Do yourself a favor and avoid this place at all costs. I cant even imagine how much the bill would have been if something serious had happened.

LE

leslie mallamace

good Samaritan is excellent with initial care but I have been there in the emergency room when they sent home a man because they thought he really just had severe abdominal pain. Well he showed up 4 hours later needing emergency surgery because of internal bleeding. Another time I was there they wanted to send me home. I am very heavy so they did not assist me in walking. Which was the reasons I went because all of a sudden I was not able to walk. I took two steps and fell. Later I found Out I had an acute injury to my back and some time earlier when I had fallen I had broken my back. Now The later was before but the lower injury had happened within the last 24 hours because even though they wanted to discharge me before they had to admit me. Sadly to say I insisted on the CT scan before leaving and they said everything was normal= now:they" are the doctors they assigned me. It also took 4 days to control my blood until they called an endocrinologist They never did suggest based on what they thought - I was faking it all, see a psychiatrist? I had injured my back - see an orthopedist? See an endocrinologist? I of course have some of these but they had me discharged without seeing any doctor that morning or on the paper say I should consider seeing the following doctors and that was because they according to them I was fine. Maybe it was a misdiagnosis when I went in but their care from the thought I was over acting caused me serious problems and injuries.Just like the man that needed emergency surgery because they thought he was overacting. I would rate the hospital one in some cases like this but much higher in other. I think Good Samaritan is the luck of the draw.