Saint Barnabas Medical Center (COE) Hospital

Excellent service. Other than one nurse and an aide I had no problems. Getting my blood drawn and my IV started was horrible but all else great. My favorite two nurses were Norma and Maria. The nurses aides were so helpful and nice too.

It was a very good hospital experience. Everyone takes the time to answer your questions. The nurses (Joanne,Tawanda,Fleta,Norma, Pat B, Gwen) were the BEST on the 4700 wing. All very caring and encouraging..willing to take the time with their patients.

One word of advice to all though..make sure to check that you have all your prescriptions when discharged..my discharge nurse (who does not appear in the list above) was very abrupt and forget my prescriptions! It was a hassle to get Prevacid and Roxicet once I got home without the prescriptions. Lots of phone calls. UGH

But overall it was a GREAT experience.

they are always on call to handle your every need

There was a bed shortage that forced me to stay in the Telemetry Unit for my entire stay. The room I shared had three other patients in it. Everyday of my recovery I was visited and told that I would be moved to a semi-private room later that day.... I never was.
Staff in this unit were not experienced to deal with a patient with MY kind of recovery - and their lack of patient care knowledge was highly evident and detrimental to my experience. In this type of unit the average patient was very old and usually asleep all day and night long. Telemetry patients have very little to no communication with staff, don't require anything more than a check two or three times a day, and hardly ever, if ever, get up to move around. Suddenly there I was, needing to be unhooked for frequent trips to the bathroom, support for hallway walking, and constant monitoring of post-surgical pain medication and the nursing staff almost didn't know what to do with me.
All except for Marie (she was fabulous and caring and stuck up for me), the rest of my nurses and the staff in that unit could be handed their walking papers if it based on my review. And I'm NOT exaggerating - they made my stay HORRID!
The first night (day of surgery, high level of discomfort/pain) I could feel that something was wrong with my catheter. I rang for the nurse twice, telling her both times that something was wrong. She insisted everything was fine and I should just stop trying to "hold it". You all know what's coming up next. Sure enough, my catheter had come out and now I had to endure rolling over onto my sides and shakingly holding myself up in place while they cleaned up the bed and me. How embarrasing and infuriating and excrutiatingly painful to have to endure! After I tried to tell them TWICE!!
Then,... they refused to put the catheter back in. Which meant that every time that I had to use the bathroom (which is quite alot when they are pumping liquids into you all day long and forcing you to sip water every few minutes) I'd have to be unhooked from my monitor and my leg compressors and helped across the room to the bathroom (I was the furthest patient from the bathroom and the ONLY patient in the room using it). This annoyed my nurses, and subsequently they acted annoyed towards me! Like I was a burden and interruption to their normal routine.
The first time I needed help up to cross the room to the bathroom, the nurse (a different one than 'the catheter nurse') told me to lean on my IV pole for support. She then turned away from me and proceeded to drag the pole across the floor behind her as she quickly tried to head to the bathroom. You aren't supposed to even get out of bed for a couple of days and here she was racing me along. (Remember, this is all in the first NIGHT!) I had to ask her 3 times to not drag me as I hobbled after my pole. Finally I had to yank my IV pole back towards me when it became apparent she either couldn't hear me or was ignoring me.
And then there was Charmaine. This nurse talked down to me like I was a five year old. She was soooo patronizing. The second night of my stay was the worst as far as number of times I had to get up to go to the bathroom, and Charmaine was getting more and more peeved every time. Around the fourth trip, my Morphine drip needed changing. Instead of getting me back to my bed and hooked back up to recover from the event, she made me stand in the middle of the room while she went to find a new vial of Morphine. So I'm standing there all by myself, in a darkened room, with my butt hanging open to the hallway, shaking in pain. She comes back, opens the unit, pulls out the old vial, unscrews the new vial and I hear "Crack,... clinkle, clinkle, clinkle". Charmaine only looks at the vial for a second before she puts the tube into my Morphine Unit and closes it up. I'm thinking, "Well, it must be alright or she wouldn't have put it in." Then she says, "Okay, let's go." I refuse to move anywhere until she cleans up the broken glass laying on the ground in my walking path (I only had thin socks on). She gets a towel and wipes the broken shards to the side.
The next morning I couldn't have been in more pain - it took until late morning / early afternoon to discover that the vial she put in my Morphine drip was NOT okay to use - it's wasn't just the lid to the vial that cracked and fell to the floor, the entire top of the tube was broken and spitting out my pain medication - no Morphine was getting to me for over 7 hours. I wonder now if she didn't do it on purpose because I was having to get up so often that night.
Marie (my angel nurse) and I discovered the Morphine dripping down the side of the unit the next day. She IMMEDIATELY took out the broken tube, contacted my doctor, reported the incident, wrote up Charmaine, and came around to check on me every hour after that.
I loved Marie. Simply loved her.
I actually needed to be taken off the Morphine and switched to a different drug anyway, Roxicet. When Marie brought it around she gave me a large dose of it since I'd been without any pain medicine for hours and was in considerable discomfort. Within half an hour I felt the best I had up to that point. Plus, it made me a little sleepy which was good since I hadn't had any sleep hardly at all the night before with all the bathroom trips.
Charmaine was back on for the very next night shift and she took my pain medication back down to the lowest dose - but it turns out that that was enough to ease my discomfort and keep me sleepy. That night I only had to get up twice. The only thing keeping me away that night was the heat and the smell from the expulsions of the invalid geriatric in the bed beside me - they weren't keeping her too well cleaned in my opinion. As it turned out,... that old lady died sometime early that morning and the death wasn't discovered until after 7 or 8.
((It makes you wonder why her heart monitor alarm didn't go off. Everyone on that unit, including me (though my doctor kept insisting they remove them from me - I didn't need it), was hooked up to heart monitoring equipment.))
Also, communication amoungst hospital transport staff was very very poor. As I was waiting for my wheelchair to come get me for my discharge, a member from the patient transport staff mistaken came waltzing into my bed curtain area to remove the dead woman's body down to the Morgue. Needless to say, the look on his face was quite amusing when he saw a live person sitting up in the chair waiting for him. He stared at me for a good long moment, turned and fled without comment. I thought he should have excused himself for the mistake; at least apologized for entering without announcing he was coming into a patient care area (yes, I know he wasn't expecting anyone to be there who would have been in any condition to have minded, but once he realized the error, that the person there was alive, he should have at least said SOMETHING to me - not have just turned and quickly left).
When my wheelchair did arrive, it was not large enough to accommodate me (even though when Marie phoned, I distinctly heard her request that large size wheelchair). When the girl showed up, I tried telling her that I wouldn't be able to fit in the one she brought. She insisted that I try anyway (lazy, didn't want to go find another). So I had to get up and painfully try to lower myself into the chair. Of course, I didn't fit. When she finally DID come back, after what seemed like a half hour, the wheelchair was only SLIGHTLY wider than the last one. I fit, but was uncomfortably pinched and the ride was most painful and bumpy.

I was happy to leave.

The hospital was very clean. The nursing staff was very professional and attentive. I never was lacking anything I needed or requested. The respiratory department was excellent. They made sure I did my exercises regularly, which I feel is a very important part of your recovery. The dietary staff was so pleasant and accomodating. Although the diet I was on was so limited they did everything they could to make me happy, even down to getting my my favorite flavor jello. St.Barnabas is very well equipped and I knew that whatever situations might arise that I was in the best hospital to handle it. I cannot say enough about St.Barnabas.

Nurses need to be specifically obesity trained, most clueless and judgemental on all obesity issues.

I would definitely recommend St. Barnabas Medical Center. The staff are completely competent in handling this type of procedure and they are very sensitive to overweight clients.