The decline of the individual patient in the face of confidence in the shift change of public medicine

Let’s say I’m talking about a fictional city described in a song by a famous singer-songwriter. Let’s say this has never really happened. It’s just a fiction that I’m making up because I’m a writer with a lot of imagination. If its moral serves as a warning for navigators, I will be satisfied.

At the end of the day, it is only the subjective reflection of someone who would not be edifying or happy to tell us about his sad experience: but I will say that, in that city that I do not remember the name of, many years ago, I spent a summer working as a porter and attended by own account to an alienated young man who did not know how to get his admission again -since he had just escaped from a psychiatric hospital-.

Those were different times and now they say that many Spanish doctors are emigrating, while the nurses return. Notwithstanding the good preparation and good intentions of those who remain, I wonder how they will solve the ballot of being part of a health system created by certain politicians to promote private health and let him be deliberately more and more inhumane and negligent.

after years of lack of investment in public healththe previous generation, with a huge vulnerable and unprotected sector, confidently and helplessly heads towards its own aging.

Doesn’t the shadow of a deliberate lack of sensitivity to participate in such a collapse of hospitals and even the shadow of a society less and less humane fly over?

On twelfth night I attended the perplexed collective consummation of the tease to a poor sick worker. Indeed, it was half past eight in the evening -in the middle of the parade of the wise men- and the poor subject had severe chest pain and considerable shortness of breath, and due to the lack of attention due to the lists of He waited to see the specialists and, as he suffered constant dizziness, he went to the most important hospital in the city.

Aware of his extreme seriousness and his lack of medical treatment, he ventured to ask the wise men for an accurate diagnosis and a possible cure aimed at future improvement. After checking in for admission, a grim situation awaited him in the waiting room.

The first thing that caught his attention was the number of patients and the diversity of their pathologies. Now that the highest peaks of the pandemic have been overcome,Waiting rooms full of elderly people on their stretchers as if they had plenty of time to take a nap before being treated will be normal in other European countries? The next striking thing was an eighty-five-year-old man who with a small walker wandered senselessly through all the waiting rooms. He had spent ten hours without anyone knowing who to call and where to take the battered and alienated old man.

Then it was the turn of the woman – with her furious husband who accompanied her – who fainted almost intentionally to be attended to. And finally the subject who suffered from a serious cardiac pathology still undiagnosed, after four hours of waiting was called to be treated. A young doctor asked her what was wrong, to which she replied that her heart hurt a lot. The doctor measured her blood pressure and saturation and, given the apparently normal results, she requested a blood test. Another two hours later they called him again.

The next, different doctor, this time older and with the appearance of a boss, told her that she had given her a wrong parameter that suggested renal dysfunction. And that she probably had to operate. Without giving him any date for this possible operation, the only thing she could offer him was an ultrasound the next day, due to the wee hours of the morning, without closing his story and a kind of safe-conduct written in ballpoint pen for the next shift.

The patient returned home panting with his probable renal dysfunction and his medical commiseration letter. At home he quenched his thirst since in the waiting room there was not even a sad machine that sold bottles of water and the next morning he woke up still alive and in good spirits and took a taxi to the well-known hospital in the city.

The doctor who treated him this time, in the presence of the shift change, ignored the safe-conduct. He called his boss who confirmed that this paper was useless and that the doctor who signed it did not even exist. After waiting two more hours, the ultrasound confirmed that the kidneys were doing great and that what had happened was that he had been very thirsty in the waiting room. Respect for the heart, he was referred to the specialist on a waiting list sine die. Of course there was a formal complaint. «They have not done any complex test to rule out a potentially fatal disease, they have sent me home with possible kidney failure and a written and falsely signed note. And to top it off they almost killed me with thirst because I was dizzy and it was hard for me to walk ».

In short, both turns are kidding me. Isn’t the shadow of a deliberate lack of sensitivity to participate in such a collapse of hospitals and even the shadow of a society less and less humane, and in which when a person is alone, there are no examples left even to remember? the parable of the good samaritan