In 2006 the American Hospital Association and the Joint Commission published Total Health and Safety for Healthcare Facilities by Linda Chaff, a close friend who graciously asked me to participate in the preparation of this update and expansion of the 1986 NIOSH publication, Guidelines for Protecting the Health and Safety of Healthcare Workers. I was the principal author of the NIOSH publication and a principal contributor to Linda Chaff’s book.
I had grown weary of writing the standard occupational health and safety book and Linda had a novel idea that how employees are treated has a direct bearing on work-related injuries and illnesses but more importantly on patient outcomes. And so we set off on journey to 1) prove that we were right and 2) to find that hospital that had already figured that out.
We believed that it would be easy to prove that our approach would work. After all, the Demming model of process improvement worked every where it had been seriously implemented and we were convinced that there was no reason why it couldn’t work in America’s 5,000 healthcare facilities. Much to our dismay we never found that hospital in the US. We were, however, able to implement our model health and safety program and its vital Caring Values component in a small hospital in Washington state with great success largely due to the commitment of the hospitals CEO and the eagerness of the staff at all levels to work with us to improve both employee health and patient care.
Our inability to not only find a hospital that had already understood the relationship between how we treat one another and its positive effect on worker safety and health and patient care and outcome was discouraging and has bothered both of us over these last two decades. But nothing prepared me for what was to come when SARS-CoV-2 appeared in the U.S.
Until SARS-CoV-2 I comforted myself with the public health sobriquet that the United States had the best health care in the world. The discovery of the collusion between the pharmaceutical industry, our public health agencies, and our healthcare delivery system can only be described as the beginning of a period of substantial despair and even more substantial anger.
The discovery that OUR government has been paying the Nation’s health care facilities to test, report positive test results , admit patients, treat patients with Remdesivir (a drug known to be hazardous), treatment by intubation with mechanical ventilation, AND for EACH COVID RELATED DEATH is, at best —chilling. Worse yet is the insistence that EVERYONE including virtually invulnerable children from 0 to 12 years of age be inoculated with what we know to be a dangerous mRNA preparation is an unconscionable act of greed both for money and power.
If the greatest health care system in the world is this corrupt then what must the rest of the world be experiencing?
FRAME SHIFT
In 2016 (before we met) my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time she lived in Beckley, West Virginia and the closest major oncology center was Duke University. So off she went desperate to be treated and be rid of this scourge. What better place to be than one of the premier cancer treatment centers in the World? Surely her treatment and care would be state of the art and exemplary.
Without going into the details it is sufficient to say that her experience was horrifying and as she puts it following treatment with a standard “chemotherapeutic" agent and the “universally accepted” American standard of treatment and care — she laid “between life and death for seven weeks”.
Finally she was declared “cancer free” by the oncologist at Duke and she gratefully returned to her home and family in Beckley.
Over the next several years our personal lives changed which led to our meeting, a wonderful brief but certain courtship, and, of course, marriage. During that period she insisted that should her cancer ever return there would be no chemo “therapy”.
Less than one year into our honeymoon the muscle pain in her hip was determined to be metastatic breast cancer that had taken up residence in her pelvis. The first oncologist we saw offered a picture of chemotherapeutic poison free treatment and apart from a brief series of low dose radiation sessions to destroy the tumor that was pressing on her sciatic nerve and the suggestion that there were clinical trials available that she might be eligible for there was no definitive and groundbreaking treatment offered. The Standard of Care, chemical poisoning the success of which 50 years after the declaration of “war” on cancer was still being measured in the standard five year survival rate was the best he had to offer.
During that period the most animated our oncologist became was when my wife said “vitamin C” which is the equivalent of saying Ivermectin to Tony Fauci. We found a new oncologist and an M.D. trained at the Cleveland Clinic who tossed a career in “main stream medicine” aside for a career practicing medicine as she knew it should be practiced and who easily offered high dose vitamin C which kept the tumor at bay for almost a year when it returned with a vengeance in multiple locations.
We found a third oncologist (the second one retired) who offered something other than chemotherapy and more importantly one who accepted my wife’s high dose vitamin C treatments. But we both realized that more was needed to not just hold this disease at bay but to keep it locked away where it could do no harm. Searching for such a place was like trying find an oasis in Death Valley.
Not only have we found that oasis of care but I found that healthcare facility that Linda Chaff and I were never able to find.
Not only is the standard of care groundbreaking in its deployment of a multifaceted all options approach to treatment with a success rate twice that of the standard American oncology center but the staff, at all levels, is top notch AND happy. No one grumbles or complains about management, the hours, or how they feel disrespected, and as patients it is a joy to interact with them. For patients this facility is truly an Oasis of Hope.
Established in 1963 the Oasis of Hope hospital, founded by Ernesto Contreras, M.D. an oncology surgeon trained in Mexico and Harvard university integrates the standard cancer treatments with a host of alternative approaches to treating the patient and not the disease. At the center of The Total Care Approach developed by Dr. Contreras is the certain knowledge that faith in God is essential to the healing process.
To be fair there are those who succumb to their illness but those are the exceptions. Despite that, to a patient those that are here cannot imagine being anywhere else because in most cases they have been to those other hospitals and found them wanting in options and lacking in compassion and hope.
As the First Century physician, Luke explained:
“He welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed healing.” Luke 9:11
Tijuana, Baja, Mexico
20 Mayo 2022
I read "the relationship between how we treat one another and its positive effect on worker safety and health and patient care" with hreat interest. How can I obtain more info on that for my workplace? I don't work in healthcare but education but I agree that creating that culture is so important and Would you point me to your or others' studies on this topic?
Prayers with you regarding the treatments, sir.
Have you had any difficulty with reimbursements for services at that Oasis institution, since it is in Mexico? Is it basically a cash payment operation, or are you able to use any third party payer system? No need to answer if that's a bothersome question- MRW