Baystate Medical Center

"Billing dept as a whole needs an entire revamp. I have spent hrs trying to make contact with someone (and had to rely on my ins company to finally make contact for me) and weeks and weeks cleaning up their messes (billing me without billing my insurance, billing me 2 years after service was received, putting me on a payment plan only to find out thr plan was never submitted). Every time i call the # on the bill it's never the correct # and they don't provide a detailed list of services whoch should be illegal. Just sad."

"I have been here twice, with their minimum of 12 hour wait time, it feels like purgatory and symptoms will overall worsen. Eventually no doctors call anyone back for hours on end. I feel helpless knowing I would not be able to receive medical treatment if I needed it in my life in general now. Feels more like a 3rd world country medical system; possibly worse."

"The emergency room is horrible. They will make you literally wait 12 hours. Maybe even more just to see the doctor for 10 minutes. It’s horrible. I don’t even think they deserve 2.8. They deserve like 1.5. The staff is rude they don’t care they sit down and chat amongst each other eating chips and there’s people dying in the hallway. They don’t even have enough rooms for everybody. They’ll wait literally till a certain time to start calling people, like this place needs to fire their whole entire staff and higher people who actually want to work and help sick people"

"There are maybe some good doctors, nurses and other staff working for Baystate (if they happen to stay there long enough and did not get fired during Covid vaccine mandate), but the hospital has a very faulty and monstrous system in general that makes it impossible to give the patients the time and attention that they need and creates poor communication with the patients' family, that leads to bad outcomes for the patients and their families as well. I hope something changes there in the near future. For Oncology needs I recommend Dana Farber in Boston (outstanding Harvard trained docs), for any neurological emergencies - Hartford Hospital is the place to be, they have great neurosurgeons. Hartford Hospital is much more advanced in every way and in every department. Their ER wait time is also considerably shorter (you can look up their ER wait time online). God bless you and your loved ones, as you navigate the tunnels of current medical system in order to get the help and care that you need."

"After my son was treated so badly at Baystate earlier this year, I will bring him elsewhere in the future. We arrived at the hospital around 4pm since my kiddo, who had tested positive for COVID-19 the month prior complained of worsening chest pain while breathing. The first doctor we spoke with was amazing and recommended that he get a chest x-ray to determine what was going on. It all went downhill from there. I explained at least half a dozen times to various folks that my child has severe anxiety in medical settings and is also afraid of loud noises due to a bad experience with an X-ray machine at the dentist. When we were finally called to go to the X-ray room after over three hours, he predictably got upset and anxious over the dark room as well as the noise. He was crying to the point that the technician told us to go back down to the emergency room where someone would bring a portable X-ray machine to his bed. Why this wasn’t done first and foremost is beyond me. When we got back to the emergency room, without having had the X-rays done, a PA named Sara snapped at me and told me I needed to explain to her “what exactly happened up there” in an extremely sarcastic tone. It is incredibly disturbing to me that someone who works in a CHILDREN’S hospital simply could not understand that a child with anxiety and sensitivity to loud noise was afraid of an X-ray machine. While we continued to wait for the portable X-ray machine, three nurses came into the room and attempted to draw blood from my son. Two of the nurses appeared very young and inexperienced but were fairly polite. The third nurse Heather was absolutely awful. She stood in the corner glaring at my son and doing nothing to assist while the other two nurses tried to calm him down to do the blood draw. I have never seen a nurse, or any other adult for that matter, stare at a child with such sheer malice. It was absolutely chilling. Heather has no business working with ill or injured children - this was made obvious by the fact that she had no patience for my anxious child and all but yelled, “WE’LL COME BACK LATER” to take blood before rolling her eyes and stomping out of the room. Not long after, a technician finally came in with the portable X-ray machine. About an hour later another doctor came in and suggested my son take a sedative in order to calm down enough for a blood draw, which we agreed to. Unfortunately, my kiddo experienced awful side effects which included hallucinations, making his anxiety much worse instead of better. When two of the nurses came in again (thankfully not Heather) I relayed that my kiddo was not relaxed as we had hoped, but instead was hallucinating awful things such as a bear in the room, a car driving straight at us and the curtain trying to suffocate him. Since the attempt to relax him with medication had failed miserably, the two nurses as well as myself had to hold him down in order for the blood draw to take place. This resulted in my son crying and screaming uncontrollably as the nurses struggled to draw blood while he continued to hallucinate. After this was finally done, we waited another several hours to finally be told that he had costochondritis. We spent over seven hours here where almost all of the staff treated my child like a pariah simply because he was anxious and afraid. It is extremely disheartening that such a large and well-funded hospital is apparently not training its staff to be able to effectively respond to patients with anxiety and other mental health concerns. I can only imagine how an autistic or intellectually disabled child would have felt in those circumstances. With the exception of Dr. Y and Dr. A who were fantastic, we were beyond disappointed with this experience. Baystate, for the sake of the community you serve, get your staff some better training."