I was once given an explanation for the attitude to patients that is endemic in our public health system.
Our public hospitals in New Zealand are based on – and inherit their underpinning culture from – the British Public Hospital system. They, in turn, grew from the charity hospitals of the 19th century. Then – as is again becoming the case today – people of any means paid for medical care. Those who couldn’t afford a doctor and private nursing – if they couldn’t get better on their own – were stuck with the charity hospital and what treatment the doctors and medical staff thought most appropriate. Patients had no voice – no say in their treatment, and no right to any respect. They were simply collections of symptoms to be given treatment – useful, perhaps, as examples for students, but of no particular value.
Meanwhile, in the private system then as now, patients who could pay for their own treatment received medical advice on which to base their own decisions, and they were treated as clients rather than subjects.
My informant was a GP – he believed that the system wouldn’t change until GPs made part of the decisionmaking care team in the hospital system, as advocates and lead medical advisers for their own clients. Instead, as soon as a GP’s client becomes a hospital patient, the GP is left out of the consulting circle. He or she is sent a copy of any decisions after a hospital medical practitioner has made them, but isn’t part of the care team.
We’ve just paid $400 for our Mum to have a private consultation to receive the information we need for decisionmaking, since she was discharged from hospital without any explanation, information, or care plan. The consultation has not made any difference to medical management; there is no new treatment plan. But we’ve been listened to; we’ve had the opportunity to have questions answered; we’ve had matters explained so that Mum can make her own decisions about how to live from now on. It was $400 well spent.
Ironically, the specialist we consulted is the head of the public hospital team. If he made sure his people did their jobs in the public system as well as he does his job in the private system, we’d have been better off. He, however, would have been $400 worse off. And that’s just one patient. With that incentive structure, what are the likely results?
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Well, Joyful, if your illustration presents an accurate picture of N.Z. health care,
it will surely be the envy of the current British Public Health system.
Nobody ever thinks of reading The Bible to “British” patients these days. Shame.
This is an absolutely fascinating chart that is worth having a look at regarding health coverage……….
http://dailydish.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e20167620b0abe970b-popup
There’s a growing gulf between the Bishops and the faithful on this.
Humanae Vitae as a teaching was never accepted by most Catholics.
God Bless
Pity. Especially given how prophetic it has proven.
Humanae Vitae needn’t be simply taken or left JP. It can be prophetic, while also intellectually crippled by its reversal of the Catholic Churchs brief foray into sanity with respect to contraception.
And this from Reuters:
Some 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women in the United States have used contraceptive methods banned by the church, research published on Wednesday showed.
A new report from the Guttmacher Institute, the nonprofit sexual health research organization, shows that only 2 percent of Catholic women, even those who regularly attend church, rely on natural family planning.
The latest data shows practices of Catholic women are in line with women of other religious affiliations and adult American women in general.
I couldn’t find the report on http://www.guttmacher.org/. I did find the history of the Institute, though: http://www.guttmacher.org/about/history.html
I’m not particularly interested in the health insurance debate in the US – from what little I’ve read, it seems to me that both sides are so driven by ideology that they’re incapable of thinking. And the health and welfare of the most disadvantaged has been completely buried in pro and anti rhetoric. But if I thought the proposed law was wrong to force people to pay for something that is against their consciences, the percentages of Catholic women who have at some time used artifical contraception wouldn’t change my mind. And if I did think that percentage had any significance in the argument, I wouldn’t be inclined to take Reuters report of the research at face value, without looking at the methodology.
As it is, my taxes have been paying for things that are against my conscience for my entire working life; my option is to complain through democratic channels, and to make the best of the good things that my taxes pay for.
Various US Catholic Bishops have been providing insurance cover which includes contraception for their employees for over a decade now. It’s amazing how suddenly this has apparently become a huge conscience issue for them !
In the USA, employer provided health insurance is part of the employees wage and therefore the employee has the right to decide how to spend it according to the employees conscience. The conscience of the employer shouldn’t get a look in here.
God Bless