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A comment by Theobald Tiger

Last week, a friend of mine was picked up from his home in an ambulance by the fire brigade and taken to the hospital in the middle of the night with a suspected slipped disc. Clearly an emergency. Now, there’s a certain way of dealing with emergencies and people. What just simply seems strange to one person may be taken very seriously by another. With that in mind, I’m asking you, dear reader, if you’d like to give me your opinion about whether our healthcare system could be improved, or if it’s better left as it is? Share your thoughts with us. Should we take the doctors’ criticisms seriously or rather take them with a pinch of salt?

In any case, from 11 p.m. on Saturday until 10 a.m. on Sunday, there wasn’t a single doctor present in the emergency department of a large hospital. Just nurses and orderlies. As a final act of medical humanity, the patient was given a handful of painkillers. Then the doctor took his leave and disappeared into the night. This happened shortly before midnight. The patient was supposed to have an X-ray around 1 a.m., as he was told. He’s still waiting for it. Left lying in a bed in the corridor, he called me at 9 a.m. on Sunday and told me about his odyssey. I’ll keep the story brief, omitting the name of the hospital and the names of everyone involved.

Severe back pain that impairs the function of one leg is no laughing matter. You can’t walk. Leaving a hospital on a Saturday night without a doctor strikes me as a real test of courage. I’m only a journalist, after all, so perhaps I’m not best qualified to judge. Leaving sick people alone without a doctor is a real speciality of the national healthcare system. I say this as a foreigner who has lived in Portugal for a long time. I observe the situation and am deeply shocked.

It works. The doctors are on strike, but the hospital remains open. Everyone knows that this strike will achieve nothing, and that similar strikes in the future won’t achieve anything either. In more than 30 years, the “elephant” of the healthcare system hasn’t changed even minimally for the better. Quite probably, it has changed in the other direction.

Doctors mostly do what they want. They study at the state’s expense and then work in a hospital. Almost all of them claim they are poorly paid and overworked. Many can’t even afford a BMW anymore. So, many of them take on a second job – in the pharmaceutical industry, in a private practice, or somewhere else in the medical system – and then end up experiencing conflicts of interest. How does that square with the medical oath? Nurses and orderlies, on the other hand, work day and night shifts, seven days a week, and many rack up a huge mountain of overtime. What should we do with the doctors?

The fact is, if you have to care for 30 patients in the corridor and one of them needs to use the toilet in the middle of the night, things don’t always work well. The patient ends up wetting himself in the bed. However, when patients are thirsty, I’ve never seen one in the corridor not getting any water to drink. Maybe they’ve wet themselves? It doesn’t matter. After all, they’ll get a diaper put on them.

When I arrived at the hospital at ten o’clock and insisted on seeing the patient and taking him away, he hadn’t even had a proper breakfast. Just a yoghurt and a biscuit. I think state-run hospitals that function in this way should be shut down and everyone involved simply fired. Why? Because they lack the moral competence to treat sick people appropriately. They should be retrained as prison guards instead.