So last Sunday morning, the man wakes up at 5 am, as he does every day, takes his morning walk and prepares for the day. After breakfast, he leaves for work and everything seems fine. But in the office, around noon, our man starts to feel bad and develops a fever. After consulting with his family physician he decides to go to the Emergency Room at the Hillel Yaffe hospital to be checked out.
At the hospital, our man receives the medical care that he requires from the doctors and nurses in the Emergency room and in the end he is admitted to the hospital and transferred to the department that will take care of him.
With the treatment his doctors decided upon for him, the man slowly starts to feel better and on Thursday afternoon, our man is released from the hospital and sent home.
The medical staff, the doctors, the nurses, the “support staff”, all left our man with the impression that they care for him and that they will do anything to return his health to him and with their help and dedication, the man feels like new. After thanking all the people who took care of him our man left the hospital feeling healthy and well.
All in all, a pretty standard story and with a happy ending as well! But wait! There is another side of this tale too! A side that doesn’t sound so great but must be told. For the well-being of the next patient and for the well-being of the medical staff.
Our man arrived at the Emergency Room of the Hille Yaffe hospital, feeling very bad, at six thirty in the evening. A pre-check is conducted, so as to direct patients to the appropriate section of the Emergency Room and after a Corona test, our man was directed to go and wait outside of Room 8, where “they” will call him.
The expression “wait” has a been completely redefined at the Hillel Yaffe hospital. The medical staff responsible for the patients waiting outside Room 8, did not rest for a moment, never sat down for a minute, but in order to be able to give responsible care, time is required, even if there are dozens of people waiting for them.
Delays in testing, delays in examinations, specialists that are not available because they are busy elsewhere, a department that cannot receive patients because it is crowded, our man waited and waited and waited. In the end, at 2 am, more than seven hours after the man arrived at the Emergency Room, he was finally transferred to the department. Once there, two friendly nurses had him do some more tests, answer some more questions and finally showed him where he would be sleeping. But not before he was administered his medicine intravenously which took another half hour. So around 3 am, our man finally could lay down his head and sleep.
At six am already, the activity in the department was renewed and temperature and blood pressure was taken from all patients. Waiting for this gave our man the opportunity to recover a little from the shock of where he found himself. A three and a half by five-meter room, which he was sharing with three other patients! The crowding in the hospital room was beyond imagination! The only very limited possibility to privacy was a curtain but a curtain does not leave out sounds. Not the sounds of sometimes very private examinations, nor the sounds of the doctor and his staff discussing the patient’s illness and his prognoses. And not the sounds that old men make in their sleep either.
As it turned out, the whole department was overcrowded like this and it is very hard to do your job as a physician properly under these circumstances.
Public medicine has its limitations and budgets of Israeli governments appear to always forget that hospitals need money, but it is interesting to know how the bureaucrats writing up these budgets feel, after they or somebody of his family has to go through an ordeal like our man had to. And of course there are those that have other options. Binyamin Netanyahu, who lives very close to the Hillel Yaffe hospital, probably doesn’t even know it exists.
Our man was lucky. His stay was for only four days, and his wife came every day to be with him and bring him his coffee. Our man was lucky also because the doctors and nurses do their job, and do their job well and with dedication just so he could go home a healthy man.
But it is high time that our politicians, the people with the other options beside Hillel Yaffe, raise their head and look around. Serving the people means more than working three days a week and collecting forty-five thousand shekel salaries.
I hope you found this article interesting and I welcome any comments you may have.
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