Baylor Scott & White is a lot like the faucets on a cheap kitchen sink: HOT and COLD, with no…read morewarning and apparently no adult supervising the plumbing.
When they're hot, they're magnificent. I have received what I would call the gold standard of medical care there--competent, compassionate people doing difficult work exceptionally well. Five stars. No hesitation.
And then the handle swings the other direction.
My latest adventure began with a broken bone that would benefit from the quaint old medical practice known as treatment. I drove in for an appointment Baylor Scott & White had scheduled, only to be informed that the doctor they scheduled me with doesn't do hands.
Excellent.
Apparently somewhere in the machinery of modern medicine, I had failed to verify that the specialist selected by the hospital was, in fact, a specialist capable of treating the body part attached to my arm.
So I was sent home to await a call from the on-call doctor so I could be rescheduled.
Five hours later: silence.
I can only assume the orthopedic emergency command center suffered a catastrophic communications failure--or somebody's tee time came up.
The final accounting: an 80-mile round trip and roughly four hours burned out of the finite supply of life allotted to me, all to discover that the doctor I had been sent to was the wrong doctor.
Then we arrive at the grievance process, where the comedy becomes almost artistic.
The Patient Rights material cheerfully encourages patients to file grievances with the "clinical manager."
Wonderful.
Who is the clinical manager?
Apparently this is classified information. The person is not identified anywhere I can find.
Then there is Patient Advocacy, a department that appears to function less like an advocacy office and more like an astronomical black hole: complaints enter, light bends, time stops, and nothing ever comes back out.
I have some experience with this phenomenon. I'm still waiting for a meaningful response to complaints I raised roughly three months ago. At this point, I'm not sure whether they're investigating them or aging them in oak barrels.
And that is the maddening thing about Baylor Scott & White.
Parts of this enormous medical machine are superb. You encounter nurses, doctors, technicians, and staff who leave you genuinely grateful such people chose medicine. They are skilled, kind, attentive, and worth every one of those five stars.
Then, without warning, you wander through another door and find yourself trapped in a bureaucratic fever dream where appointments lead to doctors who don't treat your injury, nobody seems responsible for anything, and "patient advocacy" has all the responsiveness of a mailbox painted onto a brick wall.
So how do I rate Baylor Scott & White?
That's easy.
Five stars when they're hot.
One star when they're cold.
And God help you if you turn the faucet expecting one and get the other.
