"An Evil Spirit Named JCAHO"

I've blogged about my disgust with JCAHO as an effective regulatory body before. The whole hospital accreditation process is, IMHO, a self-perpetuating hospital-financed racket.

JCAHO certainly didn't do anything to help me in Asheboro (this incident apparently did not qualify as a "sentinal event").

And every time this crowd shows up anywhere, they almost always make my job harder.

I do not blog about current assignments (that's not why I'm in the blogsphere) and I'm not going to start now. Except to say that this week, the policies and plundering of clueless JCAHO surveyors (who, during their visit and prior to their mandates, didn't bother to chat up the Pediatrician who actually attends emergencies) made it exponentially harder to do my job . . . a job in which I had to deal with a harrowing & potentially catastrophic obstetric event (contrary to the theories that made John Edwards rich, sometimes bad things just happen in medicine - they are nobody's fault).

The LDRP & OR staff of this little rural hospital (that deserves much more respect than it usually gets) pulled together and did their job (very well). I did my job (very well). And the baby is just fine . . . after scaring the CRAP out of everybody.

And I am very hard to scare.

All babies are miracles. But some are more miraculous than others. This particular one smiled at me today as she passed gas.

It was a miracle;)

And you could say we had a good outcome in spite of JCAHO.

This morning in the OR, as I attended a routine C-Section, a nurse was hunting for something that the OB needed . . . something moved somewhere else in order to satisfy the whim of a long-gone JCAHO surveyor. I helped her search. She joked that "evil spirits must have hidden it."

"Yeah", I said. "An evil spirit named JCAHO."