Word: rabkin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...posh 176-bed Feldberg Building has already won a reputation among patients as the hotel with nurses and operating rooms. It is far more than that. More than a decade in the planning, the wing caps a long campaign by Beth Israel's innovative director, Dr. Mitchell Rabkin, 45, to ensure patients a "full bill of rights," which he feels is long overdue. As the Harvard-educated endocrinologist puts it: "We have reached the point where doctors and hospitals can really tyrannize patients...
...Rabkin's favorite innovations is what he calls "a telephone hot line for patients," which enables them to call direct from their rooms to the hospital service manager if a bulb burns out or the kitchen is late in delivering dinners ordered from one of the seven different room-service menus. Says Rabkin: "I have seen a lumpy mattress replaced within 20 minutes of the hotline call...
...director periodically reviews the log of calls-and the responses to them -to keep the staff on its toes. He may also take other action; even his fellow doctors are not spared Rabkin's criticism. After he discovered that a patient had been left unattended in a corridor, he rebuked the physician responsible (without naming him) in his weekly "Dear Doctor" memo to the staff. Explains Rabkin: "A patient's rights brochure is not worth the paper it is printed on if it does not reflect an institutional commitment." At Beth Israel, whose bright new wing is attracting...
...part of what doctors say is a larger pattern of nonaggressive treatment of moribund patients. "You have a patient, 90 years old, with metastatic cancer; he's dying. What DNR means to physicians is, 'Look fellas, no heroics. Let the poor guy die in peace,"' Dr. Mitchell T. Rabkin, '51, associate professor of medicine and general director of the Beth Israel Hospital, says...