Surgical otolaryngology resident John Ingle remembers the patient well - she was alone, she was desperately ill, and she didn’t have health insurance. Somehow, she had made it from her home in Las Vegas, N.M. to the emergency room of the University of Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, the only one that would accept indigent patients like her, the young UNMH surgeon recently told me.

Ingle remembers operating for hours that night to try to save the woman’s sight.

"She presented late because she didn’t have a primary care doctor," he said.  "She had a really severe infection in the bone around one of her eyes - the infection had come from her sinuses. We admitted her immediately and took her to the operating room in an attempt to save her vision."

Despite Ingle’s effort, the patient did lose the vision in her right eye. Her underlying infection was so severe she remained in the hospital for weeks on intravenous antibiotic therapy.

The long hospital stay away from her friends and family took a toll on the woman, and on the nurses and doctors who cared for her, said Ingle. She would have been able to leave the hospital much sooner if healthcare would have been available to her in Las Vegas. But Bernalillo County is the only county in New Mexico to maintain an indigent patient fund, paid for by money from a mill levy that has been in place for years and which will be on the ballot for renewal this November.

"This is someone who has lived in New Mexico her whole life and we were the only people there to watch over her," said Ingle. "We were happy to finally be able to send her home and out of the hospital, but when she left, she cried, bitterly. She considered us her family. It really tore me up."

Sadly, Ingle has already collected dozens of grindingly sad stories just like these in his more than two years of tending to the poorest and sickest at the state’s largest hospital.

He’s seen patients who - like the woman he treated - had preventable or treatable conditions but needlessly ended up suffering through long, expensive hospital stays at UNMH. He’s seen patients with non-emergency conditions who show up at the UNMH’s emergency room and wait up to 18 hours for treatment because they have no insurance and nowhere else to go. He’s heard from UNMH doctors who feel pressured to alter their treatment plans based on which medications they know their indigent patients will actually be able to afford.

"I think its just basically a sign of how sick our health care system is," he said. "We need a system where people can see a doctor and get their medicine and transition from one level of care to another."

Ingle said his dismay with the current state of the healthcare system is what led him to join Healthcare United, nationwide, non-partisan coalition of healthcare workers who formed in February to promote one message — that America’s healthcare system is broken and crying out for reform.

In New Mexico, the group includes school nurses, UNMH doctors, HMO workers and nurses and doctors from tribal and public health care facilities. They say want the system to change, not to make their lives better, but to correct the flaws in the system that keep them from providing patients with the best care.

Members like Ingle say much positive change could come from doctors and nurses simply telling the public and policy makers about what they experience every day, with clarity, empathy and passion.

"What’s happened with healthcare reform in the past is that we have the politicians talking about what should be done. The great thing about Healthcare United is that this is the first time that there’s been an organization that’s really trying to bring healthcare workers to the forefront, where they should be."

The group formed in February as a project of SEIU (Service Employees International Union), a national union that includes many healthcare workers. Since then, organizers like Ingle have held house parties to let healthcare workers talk with each other and share their stories about their work. At this early stage, much of the conversation revolves around simply identifying the problems, said Ingle.

But in time, Healthcare United plans to take an active role in working with legislators and other health policy makers to help improve the delivery of healthcare services, said Ingle.

The group hopes to take a role in educating legislators and candidates for office and then plans to hold them accountable as elected officials, say members like Elizabeth Burpee, a UNMH physician who held a recent Healthcare United party at her home.

In one of its first official acts, the New Mexico chapter will take a bus to the Democratic National Convention in Denver next week to meet up with other chapters and maximize their visibility with a rally amidst the party’s top dogs. Burpee will be a speaker at the event.

Eventually, the healthcare workers in Healthcare United aspire to effect great changes in the current system, said Ingle. It is truly incumbent upon people who spend so much time giving care to look more critically at what they are doing, he said.

"As a resident surgeon, I work 80-hour weeks providing one-on-one patient care. For me, this is a breath of fresh air; a chance to step out of my daily routine and say, ‘There’s a greater problem. We can’t just be looking at patient care as we provide it one-on-one. We need to look at county and state and nationwide policies."

In fact, Ingle said what he sees every day at UNMH has convinced him that the need for healthcare reform is so urgent that it is literally a matter of public health. And he thinks Healthcare United could be the group to spark a historic series of reforms.

"Some of the greatest advances in medicine came about because of large public health campaigns and movements. Enormous numbers of people were saved by such innovations as mass vaccinations and sanitary water and sewage treatment systems. If we can start to look at healthcare reform with the notion of it being an effort to improve public health, than I think were on the right track to make a lot of good changes," he added.

 

If you want to learn more about Healthcare United, go here. Local information is available on the group’s site. And Healthcare United New Mexico Director Oscar Lopez can be reached at 266-6659 or oscar@healthcareunited.org.