A C

Review of Kaiser Permanente Terra Linda

This kaiser is hit and miss. The pharmacy and nurs...

This kaiser is hit and miss. The pharmacy and nurses are great, most of the doctors I've dealt with have been either extremely disrespectful and rude or unknowledgeable for my situation.

I was in a motorcycle accident and left paralyzed, struggling to rehab from it. One of my home health nurses suggested a newer member there named Dr Gyorgy Pataki. I didn't know anyone there at all, and selected him as my primary. I went in to visit him a few times to introduce myself and explain what I'm going through, and he didn't seem to know much about my condition. Things started getting worse, & after a while he seemed more interested in getting me off & stopping my pain medication than actually helping me heal/get better. He had no suggestions for the multiple issues I brought up with him about my condition, and seemed to constantly "kick the can down the road" with regards to things he seemed to not know much about. He said he would confer with colleagues, but was all in all a terrible primary care physician, and I would not recommend him to anyone. I suppose he just wanted to be called doctor and get the doctor paycheck, not actually help people. If you only need one of those doctors you go to twice a year for a regular checkup, talks about drinking water and exercising a little more and says "I'll see you in 6 months", he'll be fine.

The physical medicine and rehab doctors aren't much better. Dr Yonghui Tai (spelling?) is a deplorable excuse for a physician, and doesn't deserve the right to help people with their care. In our meeting he ignored my concerns, audibly sighed when I took my phone out with a list of questions I had, and just seemed like he had somewhere else he needed to be. His behavior was so bad I wrote to whomever I could at kaiser about his disgusting treatment of a patient, and while I never heard back about anything, I hope he was spoken to about this incident. I've since been seeing Dr Scott Pinner, who is better, but seems to need to be prodded and poked and reminded to do the things he said he would do. Things are better with him helping.

The pharmacy is great, never have too many problems, I go there multiple times a month and if there's an issue with medication it can usually be resolved there in about 15-20 minutes, or if they're out of one medication I take, they give me a week supply and have the rest in a few days. The one large benefit I could see is improving the kaiser app - when you reorder medication, the pharmacy can text you when it's ready for pick up. If you reorder 6 or 7 medications like I do, you don't know which ones are ready for pickup and which ones are still pending. It'd be nice if it were combined to say "all medications are ready" or something, saving multiple trips.

All of the nurses are very nice and helpful, the wound specialist nurse Jean Tuthill & her team was also very nice helping me treat a pressure ulcer I had for far too long. All the nurses for the doctors I saw were also very nice.

The infusion area is pretty packed, I had 5 sets of iron infusions for anemia. The infusion nurses were nice, especially since I have vaso-spasms which make running IVs very difficult. They tried hard, but getting stuck 4 or 5 times trying to find an open vein wasn't very pleasant. Also, the infusion rooms were filled with at least 2 or 3 patients, making it feel very cramped. I wasn't expecting my own private room, but it was a little crowded.

The only time I had surgery here was also hit and miss, the surgery itself was fine and the ER nurses were very nice. However, the recovery was not done very well...it's absolutely unacceptable that the hospital can't get my medications correct (what I take, how much I take, and when I take it) even after telling multiple nurses multiple times the details. I'm glad I brought some of my own medication from home, because there was some that they outright didn't even give me. It was shockingly poor care.

TL;DR, pharmacy and nurses good, most doctors bad.