The hospital does a lot of good work, but it has some very serious problems, chief among them (in my experience):

- Threatening repeatedly for more than a year to discontinue a sick patient’s life-saving treatment as retribution for perfectly reasonable complaints made by me, the patient’s caregiver. The threats have been made orally and in writing (see my last two posts on this blog for more detail).

- Refusing repeatedly to honor the patient’s request to have the patient’s designated caregiver briefed as required about the patients condition and other relevant information (a right that the government of Cambodia explicitly affirms). This has placed the patient in a position of increased risk.

- Coercing the patient – to the point of duress – to sign a discriminatory “Agreement” that is not in the patient’s best interests. The patient claims that HE/SHE was intimidated by five male doctors in a closed room alone with HIM/HER.

- Routinely, over and over again, treating me and the very sick patient in a rude, crude, unprofessional and undignified manner.

- Refusing to accept and respond to reasonable and constructive criticism.

- Refusing to provide emergency treatment to the very sick patient until I complained to a senior doctor that I had to call at home after her work hours.

As if it weren’t enough to have the very poor sick patient threatened by senior level doctors at the hospital, now the hospital’s board chairman, Bernard Krisher, has apparently urged his doctors to throw out at least one letter from me that details my very serious ongoing complaints. He also went on to urge his doctors to find ways to avoid treating the sick patient, again as retribution for me making completely reasonable and logical complaints in a constructive effort to help the hospital realize that it has shortcomings that negatively impact patient health and that they can (quite easily in some cases) remedy and prevent from happening again.

And then to top it all off he called me a jerk. According to Mr. Krisher I am a jerk because I had the temerity to complain when the hospital refused to honor its obligations to a patient and threatened the patient (and me) over a prolonged period of time.

Evidently, Mr. Krisher believes that, as far as his hospital is concerned, taking care of patients whose designated caregivers complain is just a big no-no. I think I know who the jerk is, and it ain’t me!

Now I see that the doctors who threatened my poor sick friend with termination of medical treatment had the support not only of the hospital’s previous CEO Dan Liu, and its current CEO Kevin G. O’Brien, but they evidently have the support of the hospital’s board chariman… Mr. Krisher.

In an e-mail Krisher sent to me (and I presume to SHCH’s CEO Kevin O’Brien and to other senior doctors on staff at SHCH and at HOPE Worldwide in America) early this morning he closed by saying this… “let’s get this jerk once  andfor all out of our sight”.

So upon hearing that I had taken my friend to the hospital yesterday in a coma, Krisher was unconcerned about the patient’s life-threatening condition and appears to be solely concerned with avoiding having to deal with my legitimate comlaints. In my opinion Mr. Krisher is unfit to lead SHCH as its board chairman.

In my opinion this is despicable, a breach of generally accepted medical ethics, a scandalous atrocity and it runs counter to all the main points that the hospital likes to tout about itself… that it treats all patients and their caregivers with respect, dignity, kindness and compassion. What a joke! But this is not joke… this really happened and they’ve resorted to totally uncalled for name-calling, insults and threats to me (and to the sick patient). This is how doctors, the CEO and the board chairman have conducted themselves.

Here is Mr. Krisher’s hideously uncivil, undignified, unkind, uncaring and unconcerned reply to an e-mail I sent to him and others at SHCH and its parent non-profit in America, HOPE Worldwide. Below Mr. Krisher’s e-mail is the e-mail I sent to him and others that he is replying to. Both e-mails have been edited only to protect the patient’s privacy. You’ll be able to clearly note where I’ve made an edit becasue it will be IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

dear all,
i am trashing this andrecommend you do likewise.  wehave  noobligation to respond.
he is neither next of kin, a close blood relative or recognized as HIS/HER guardian.
dear all,
if HE/SHEwasreleased from the hospital i don’t know if, in any other city or country, we would have to admit or accept a patient for hospitalization either.   st luke’s  international  hospitalin tokyoin tokyo does not automatically accept patients except for outpatient consultation. if  wecan reject HIM/HER as an inpatient, please don’t accept  HIM/HER and arrange to get HIM/HER into another, state hospital.
let’s get this jerk once  andfor all out of our sight
best regards,

bernie

Wednesday – July 21, 2010

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

 ——————————————————————————————————————–

Mr. Kevin G. O’Brien
CEO/Executive Director
Sihanouk Hospital Center of HOPE

Mr. Bernard Krisher

Chairman of the Board

Sihanouk Hospital Center of HOPE

Mr. Randy Jordan

CEO

HOPE Worldwide

Mr. Gary Jacques, M.D.

VP, Global Programs

HOPE Worldwide

Mr. Mark Ottenweller, M.D.

Global Coordinator

HOPE Worldwide

Dear Sirs,

My friend THE PATIENT is in a coma and in critical condition at your hospital where I took HIM/HER today. THE PATIENT has been in a coma and in critical condition since 3 pm.

This life-threatening situation quite possibly could have been prevented if your hospital had acted in a proper, ethical and professional manner.

Why is THE PATIENT in a coma and in critical condition?

Quite possibly as a direct result of Sihanouk Hospital center of HOPE’s willful negligence and its refusal to provide the patient’s care-giver with important information just last week.

SHCH has repeatedly and explicitly refused to provide me with the information that could have ensured better compliance and adherence by the patient to HIS/HER doctor’s advice, prescribed medications, dosages and schedule. Your refusal to honor the patient’s rights and refusal to do everything possible in the patient’s best interest has demonstrably increased THE PATIENT’S risk and negatively impacted THE PATIENT’S health and HIS/HER outlook for improvement and stabilization. This is the exact opposite of what your hospital should be doing and as long as SHCH acts in a way that is contrary to the patient’s best interests and that violates HIS/HER rights I will complain vocally and publicly. This conduct is shameful, inexcusable and intolerable.

Years ago doctors at Sihanouk Hospital Center of HOPE agreed and advised (I have this in writing from a number of different documents, some in THE PATIENT’S permanent medical file) that the patient is unintentionally unreliable and that it was imperative – absolutely critical to ensure the best possible care for the patient – that as the patient’s primary home care-giver and only steady source of support I be advised thoroughly about the patient’s treatment, prescribed medications, dosages, schedule for medication and other important information.

Even after SHCH made this point to me in writing the hospital’s doctors often did not do what they said they would do, and for months now they’ve refused to provide me with any information at all, even when HE/SHE was released after a five day hospitalization just last week. They did not forget to inform me. They did not inform me partially or incorrectly… they simply flat-out refused to provide me with any information at all, even though they knew full well that it would be best for the patient if I were provided with the information that would empower me to provide the best possible care for HIM/HER. You chose to place the patient in a much riskier position than you needed to and that is spectacularly disgusting!

I was not advised or consulted by anyone from the hospital about the patient’s condition, diagnosis, treatment, medication, prognosis, etc. – despite my repeated requests and the patient’s requests that this information be provided to me… and despite the fact that it is HIS/HER right as a Cambodian citizen to have such a request honored by HIS/HER healthcare provider.

Instead THE PATIENT’S been victimized with unethical threats and negligent medical care that has deliberately placed HIM/HER in danger by increasing the risk of poor compliance and adherence to HIS/HER prescriptions. I am sorry to have to bother you, but this undeniable fact is utterly shocking, dismaying and simply unacceptable.

Important medical information that would, not only potentially, but actually and measurably help improve the patient’s condition, home-treatment and prognosis was withheld in violation of the patient’s rights and in direct contradiction to the hospital’s own written assessment that it was clearly in the patient’s best interest and a vital measure to better ensure HIS/HER compliance and adherence – that I be given the information that HE/SHE and I have always asked for, but have often been flatly and rudely denied.

This is information that Dr. Gerlinda Lucas had not only assured me of in the past, but also went to great lengths on many occasions to emphasize just how critically important my role was in actively mitigating against the risk of patient apathy, and the serious potential for non-compliance or non-adherence. Your hospital has not only acted against plain common-sense, you have acted against your own medical assessment of what would be best and most prudent for the patient!

Why is my friend in a coma and deathly ill? It may just be because of the protracted willful negligence of SHCH that resulted in the patient’s only reliable caregiver being ignored, threatened and insulted and the hospital’s prolonged mean-spirited refusal to simply cooperate with me in the best interests of the patient! Interests that your own doctors clearly identified. Your hospital made a conscious choice to both threaten a sick patient with refusal to treat HIS/HER life-threatening disease and to intentionally increase the patient’s risk as an out-patient… and this is an inexcusable atrocity.

My friend’s current life-threatening condition may very well be a direct result of your hospital again failing to supply me with the information I needed a week ago to ensure the patient’s adherence and compliance with all of her doctor’s advice and prescriptions. Now HE/SHE is in a coma and I demand that you be accountable and responsible.

No one from Hope Worldwide or SHCH has ever replied in a civil or dignified manner to my recent e-mails. Nor has anyone bothered to contact me about the substance of my serious concerns about flagrant patient-abuse and SHCH’s flat-out refusal to honor a poor sick patient’s rights and take a simple, easily achieved and obviously prudent measure to mitigate as much as is reasonably possible against a number of known significant health risks faced by this patient.

I expect and demand that someone from your organization contact me about this very urgent matter and that you inform me and the patient about the actions you will take to prevent such an inexcusable situation from ever happening again.

Sincerely,

Steve Goodman

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

MOMENTS – The new bi-monthly photography e-zine from SEA/collectiv is out and you can download it here.

Its a PDF and weighs in at about 4MB (20 pages), not too too big – and it is chock full of some pretty nice and quite diverse photography… including a modest and mysterious contribution from the Dude and his little monster Nikon camera pimped-out with a 20mm lens. Think wide-angle and big-picture.

OK, you need more of a tease than that? Say no more, nudge-nudge, wink-wink… here are a few of the photos from my series called Mysterious Little Houses in the Alley that didn’t make it into the magazine. Gotta pay a bigger bribe to the editor for the next edition (Just kidding of course, just kidding… insider Cambodian courruption humor).

I really like my small contribution, which right there is something rather unusual. Most of the time I see all the faults and very little of the good points in my own work. Call me hyper-critical if you like, but that’s just the way it is, generally. But this time I really like the series I put together right in my own backyard.

Just little houses in the alley behind my apartment here in Phnom Penh. No people, just lots of evidence of people. And lots of nice colors and textures and a certian kind of straightforward honesty, but also a bit of mystery.

Like I said, please do let me know your thoughts if you have the time. Thanks!

Ande now, back by popular demand… some fresh-from-the-steamy-hot-streets-of-Phnom-Penh Street Photography.

And my renewed commitemnt to post new photos every week from my semi-big town here in SE Asia.

 From Monday (just two days ago… osrry for the dealy, but I shot so many photos it took a few days to get ‘em processed and sorted)…

Phnom Penh street food vendor.

A kid, his sister on the bike and big brothers trying to ignore all of the above as they concentrate on their Cambodian chess battle.

A very nice kid who ought to be in school, but instead is scavenging garbage with the rest of his family.

Another nice young kid spending her days with her charcoal vendor family.

I’d like to add that these kids are not abused (Better to say that I see no indication at all of any abuse whatsoever) and are cherished by their families, but economic realities being what they are here in The Kingdom, it is very common to see small children doing hard and entirely honest work.

Groovin’ on the Chinese soap operas…

Tah-dahh!

The end.

If you have the time and interest you can check it out here.

Here's the teaser photo:

Young boy sniffing glue on the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia

That happens a lot and its often how I work. I shoot and shoot and only later, sometimes much later, do I finally discover what the real story is. Well that's life and I'm not complaining. Actually the esential point of this particular story did not reveal itself to me until I sat down and wrote the sucker.

It takes a long time to write. This story is about 1,000 words long and it took me hours and hours. Hard work, not as much fun as taking and processing photos, but quite satisfying once you finaly get the job done. I did git-er-done and there you have it.

And in other news… please stop by Sharkys on Thursday night when The Hellhounds once again take the stage to howl and wail the BLUES.

Should be a real good time with some new songs and some old ones that we repainted and lubed-up at our Sunday afternoon practice session.

So, yes… that means that stevegoodman.com, my professional photography website is not only back up-and-running, it has been refined, reconfigured, rethunk and redone and for the first time I can honestly say that I am very happy with it. Wow.

It took a lot of time, hard work and determination to git-er-done, but it was totally worth it and I learned a lot of good stuff long the way, so the whole miserably goofed-up thing turned out to be entirely positive and valuable. What could be better than that?

In a somewhat related vein, I recently ran across the followng graphic again (I had seen it before and it sprang to mind during a recent conversation with a friend of mine), so I poked aorund on Google and found it to share with my friend (and with you too).

It is at once sad and hilarious and it certainly rings true with anyone who has ever been involved in projects involving lots of different people.

It brilliantly illustrates the many pitfalls of human organizations in dealing with complex problems that are almost always made exponentially worse and more muddled by the vagaries and challenges of human communication.

Let's take a look shall we?

Pretty funny stuff and most people agree that it cleverly captures an all-too-real phenomenon that anyone who has ever worked for a large company or for the government, especially the military, can relate to and validate with their own anecdotal examples.

But that's not why I am brining it up. The interesting and downright pathetic thing is that the gist of the sort of mangled and mismanaged project in the illustration is something that I actually (singlehandedly) did to myself!

It is astonishing and instructive, not to mention being embarassing and profoundly disturbing. Despite all that, I'm managing to take it all in stride and learn from the experience, so just don't you worry about a thing.

Elabloration and commentary is forthcoming and will be published here soon. Unless I can't find the used tire I still need to really finish the job!

^The Hellhounds*, Phnom Penh's devilishly inimitable  BLUES  band, will be "Haunting the House of Sharky" again this Thursday evening (and every Thursday in January).

January 21, 2010 – at 9pm.

You are most cordially invited.

Please come as you are, but don't expect to leave unscathed. 

No cover charge… and all the BLUES you can stand.

*Good guys who made a bad deal (with you-know-who) and as a consequence

play the BLUES, Twisted Country, Odball Hillbilly and confounded Cajun music

in a decidedly dirty, nasty, twisted, vile and pleasantly repugnant way…

as if their very souls depended on it.

Honest to God… you'll have one hell of a good time!

^The Hellhounds, the Phnom Penh based BLUES band that I play guitar with, has a new blog and its pretty cool in a fun and goofy kind of way. I'll tell you this much, I spent a hell of a lot more time building the blog this past week than I did playing guitar or taking and working on making great photographs and that kind of sucks. Long story I won't share with you about things that have been distracting me and troubles that I needed to take my mind off of by throwing myself headlong into building a stupid website.

However, it did do the trick as far as taking my mind off other more important things, and now it is finished and I can stand back and enjoy the fruits of my labor as well as the fact that the project is done and came in under budget and far above expectations. How often does that happen?

That's a generally good policy to stick with and I thinik it bodes well for the future, both near-term and long-term. What about the mid-term?

There is no mid-term… that's a complete fabrication that people continue to delude themselves with. There is only now and later. anything halfway between the two is just a spot in time that will quickly pass from present to past.
 
So I'm going to turn that around thisweek (the short-term) and spend more time playing guitar, shooting and processing photos and less time pushing pixels around and beating pesky and belligerant html and PHP into submission.

Next item please…

You know, you just have to compartmentalize to deal with it all intelligently. If you don't sort of wall yourself off from certain looming imperatives then its almost impossible to deal with the other pesky bits of this business of life. Its just like piles of papers on your desk… if you wait long enough a bunch of them will become irrelevant and can be tossed satisfyingly into the rubbish bin.

What remains still has to be dealt wth, but at least al ot of the other annoying and distracting items vying for your limited attention have by now gone stale or otherwise lost their red-hot glow of urgency and irritation.

I just always find that it helps alot to be "in-the-moment",as they say, rather than straddling seven moments at once.

So first I did the blog for The Hellhounds and now I'm in the middle of doing my new mythicaldude blog… and some other stuff too.

Always in-transit…

http://www.mythicaldude.typepad.com.

In the next few days I'll stop posting there and only post here: at the new home for the mythicaldude blog.

What happened was… well,  I was sitting around thinking (but not too much) and then I talked it over with the guys (above) and we all pretty much agreed that it would be better to use WordPress and to host all of my sites in one place, so that's what I'm doing.

The upshot is that pretty soon we'll be moving…

Whoosh!

Well, not too soon, I mean I'm not going to finish this migration tonight, so there will be a certain amount of reasonably anticipated standing around with our, uh, our… hands in our pockets waiting for someithing to happen. Or whatever.

Which brings us to today's pithy quote..;

 Confidence: that feeling you experience just before you understand the problem.
 –Author Unknown
 

Welcome to the all NEW Mythicaldude Blog

Formerly at

http://mythicladude.typepad.com

NOW

located at

http://mythicaldude.net

Have fun!

Why a new blog?

The management team at Mythical Enterprises felt that the old blog was looking and feeling a bit dated and that a back-end upgrade along with a top-to bottom re-branding was in order for the new year.

Its a long story. Basically it’ll be easier, cheaper, more flexible.

Oh, not such a long story after all if you omit all the details!