The New York Times recently reported that some seniors are having difficulty accessing care because they have no one to take them home. Many clinics and hospitals will only allow you to book appointments for procedures if you can guarantee you will be escorted “door-to-door” from the waiting room to your home after your care. Services like Uber are considered inadequate, the expectation is that a friend or family member will be looking after you. But not everyone has family nearby to take them home from their appointments. And if you’re getting a lot of procedures, it can be difficult for loved ones to make time to take you home from all of them.  

In some circumstances, door-to-door policies are unnecessary. For simple procedures that only use local anesthesia, like lidocaine, there’s no reason anyone would need an escort home. Local anesthesia has no effect on mental faculties, patients should be just as lucid after it was administered as they were before. Even when having major procedures, some hospitals and clinics will let you stay on the premises until the mentally-impairing medications have worn off, and then let you leave alone when they confirm that you’re capable of doing so.

However, these door-to-door policies make a lot of sense when considering major procedures that involve heavy sedation. If a patient tries to drive or take public transit when disoriented or drowsy, they could get seriously hurt. The facilities that have these policies are right to assume that it’s their responsibility to make sure patients are not injured while under the effects of strong medication they administered. When this responsibility is neglected, and a patient is injured when they should have been supervised, that is hospital or nursing malpractice. We have experience with these kinds of cases.