Hospital in Oregon City Brings Dignity Back Into Health Care

Gone are all vestiges of coldness at Mid-Columbia Medical Center: the white sheets, the glaring lights, the aloof doctors.

Now, hospital sheets are striped or flowered. Track lighting runs the length of the halls, illuminating the watercolors on the walls rather than shining in patients’ eyes.

But most important, patients are treated as human beings deserving of dignity and respect.

“The way we treated people was wrong,” said Mark Scott, chief executive officer of the 49-bed hospital.

That realization led the hospital in this northern Oregon city of 11,000 to become the first in the nation to adopt the Planetree program.

Anyone who has been in a hospital has a horror story, Scott said. Patients are stripped of their clothes and given skimpy gowns, slapped on carts, wheeled into a lab without warning.

“I’ve stripped you of your humanity, your uniqueness. I didn’t mean to, but that’s what I did,” said Jacque Scott, director of acute care nursing and the Planetree program, and Mark Scott’s wife, in explaining the treatment awaiting patients at most hospitals.

Gail Eriksson, 49, had been hospitalized twice in Pennsylvania. Both experiences were painful: “I had good medical care, but everybody was cold and aloof,” she said.

Then she underwent laparoscopic surgery to remove her gall bladder at Mid-Columbia.

“I felt so comfortable, and everybody was so nice,” she said. They were “in touch with the human spirit.”

Technology has improved medicine, but at the expense of patients’ humanity, Scott said.

“You’re never told about what’s happening to you; you don’t understand what’s happening to you,” said Randy Carter, the hospital’s training and development director. “At this hospital, that’s not the way it works any more.”

Patients now wear colorful gowns. Friends and family may come and go as they please. Each floor includes a kitchen, a dining room and an activity area. Decorations include plants and tropical fish. Quiet rooms with panoramic views overlook the Columbia River.

But while Mid-Columbia is more homelike, the key to better care is not in the surroundings.

“This could be done in a MASH tent,” Carter said.

Patients are given as much medical information as they wish, so they can take part in their own care. They can read their charts and ask questions.

Their anxieties and fears are addressed. Nurses take time to talk and teach and hold patients’ hands.

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, knew that to heal the patient, you must heal the soul, Scott said. Planetree is named for the sycamore beneath which Hippocrates taught.

Angelica Thieriot, wife of the owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, founded Planetree after she was hospitalized in 1978. While the technology was superior to that in her native Argentina, her hospital experience was lonely, impersonal and cold.

In 1985, an experimental Planetree unit opened at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Scott heard Robin Orr, director of hospital projects at California Pacific, speak at a seminar.

Orr said she hoped one day to find a hospital to incorporate Planetree systemwide. Scott committed his hospital.

Other experimental Planetree units are operating at hospitals in San Jose and Delano, Calif., and at Beth Israel in New York City.

Mid-Columbia finished the nine-month process of incorporating the Planetree concepts in June.

Everyone who comes into contact with patients went through a weeklong training program: about 360 employees and 350 volunteers, board members, county health workers and others.

Representatives of at least 50 institutions since have visited Mid-Columbia, Carter said.

“Of that 50, there’s probably 4% who come here and really get it,” he said. “There’s 96% of those people who come here and see it.”