Hospital Patients

Twelve-year-old Casey Moore sat outside an X-ray room at the Clinical Center at National Institutes of Health in Bethesda a few days after learning she had leukemia in July 1993."

The conflict between Raymond Jackson and Mount Washington Pediatric Hospital illustrates some of the emotional issues that hospitals face as families take a more aggressive role in patient care, medical ethicists say."Part of good health care is having family involved in the care," said James Nelson of the Hastings Center, an independent, nonprofit research and educational organization in New York that examines ethical issues in medical and life sciences.But when a family's demands absorb an inordinate amount of staff time, "then it's reasonable to find some alternatives," he said.

Carroll County General Hospital is well on its way to becoming an almost paper-free institution.A new computer system links many hospital departments, lab tests are ordered and recorded by computer, and soon local doctors will be able to read their patients' hospital records on computers in their offices.The $2.4 million system, which has been installed over the past three years, has made it possible for doctors to receive medical information on hospital patients and has eliminated many mistakes caused by human error, hospital officials say."

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- As warring factions negotiate in Geneva, a team of doctors in Sarajevo are surrendering to the bitter cold.Winter, they say, has brought with it a terrible irony: It could turn them into killers.The volunteer doctors from Britain have been performing surgery on war victims, many of whom have lost the use of hands or legs. Now, cold and hunger are making such operations deadly."It didn't take an increase in shelling -- all it took was the onset of winter cold on an undernourished population," says Philip Garvin of the Humanitarian Aid Medical Development (HAMD)

When the Greater Baltimore Medical Center invested in state-of-the-art technology years ago for its radiation oncology center, it assumed its competitors would be other hospitals that operated under the same rules.But a convergence of forces changed the landscape. The cost of the machines used by GBMC to deliver high-intensity beams of radiation dropped substantially as the cancer rate in Maryland rose to the highest in the country, increasing demand for treatment.The result: The state is saturated with privately owned, competitively priced cancer treatment centers that are beginning to lure away hospital patients.

A dying patient wants to spend one last holiday with her family. A man puts beer in his feeding tube at home. A woman can't be discharged from the hospital because she is not a U.S. citizen.The problems vary widely but the people have one thing in common. All are patients facing difficulties that go well beyond the illnesses or accidents that brought them into hospitals.Coping with their needs is a group of hospital employees whose role has grown along with the pressure to discharge patients much more rapidly than in the past.

The state Department of Housing and Community Development has offered three cottages at Springfield Hospital Center in Sykesville to the governor's Homesharing Program.Each of the vacant three-bedroom homes, the former residences of hospital staff members, could house three people."[Gov. William Donald Schaefer] asked several departments to see what facilities could be used in this program," said Michael Golden, public relations director for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. "We found these cottages."

The Baltimore man found dead in his room at Springfield Medical Center Sunday died of strangulation, state police said yesterday.The victim, Wendall Dezurn, 29, was found unconscious in his bed and was pronounced dead after failed attempts by hospital staff to revive him."We know what he died of, but it is still unconfirmed as to exactly how he died," said state police Cpl. Wayne Moffatt, one of the investigators. "There is still other evidence out there that needs to be collected and evaluated before we can make that determination."

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WASHINGTON -- Out of the shadowy past of mental hospitals, when all-but-forgotten patients lived an almost brutish existence, comes a modern sequel that is slowly moving toward national prominence.For 17 years, two law partners in a small Indiana firm have been trying to win millions of dollars in wages for mental patients who were in state hospitals there -- patients who were forced, allegedly under threat, to work for nothing at the most menial tasks done in those facilities.The case has just reached the U.S. Supreme Court, posing a major test of whether the Constitution's ban on slavery and forced labor applies to the mentally ill, the retarded or to juvenile delinquents kept in state institutions.