Citizen writer Leonard Stern shares his horror at
the lack of service in hospitals:
The complete indifference of staff was striking. My friend was still waiting for the doctor to see him, if only to offer pain relief, when the doctor decided to give an improptu computer tutorial to a junior staffer.
My comment:
It isn't unbelievable.
Know what? There's always a fire. And in the emergency room, there's always an emergency. (Thus the name). It's probably buried there under a mountain of sniffles and bumps and bruises, but there's probably a legitamete one in there somewhere.
You can't possibly expect doctors and nurses to come to work and treat every walk-in as if he was in trauma-one in ER. You can't run at "emergency" service levels constantly. If fire fighters had to fight fires 12 hours a day, six days a week, they'd get a little relaxed about it. Because, you know, there's always something on fire, and if something's always on fire, there will never be the time to make sure that the hoses are stacked and rotated properly so that they work properly when requied. So some guy would stop fighting the fire, and deal with the hoses, and make sure that the new guy knew how to deal with the hoses. Because there's always something on fire.
Similarly in your job, if there was always someone getting shafted by the system, if someone was going without help because of insufficient funding, if politicians were always treating the laws as something that applied to other people, if innocent people were getting killed by drunk drivers -- well the media would soon start to treat that as a routine state of... oh wait, bad example.
Want to get mad? Get mad at the system which ensures there are not a sufficient number of family doctors. Get mad at the people who come to the ER with a bump or a bruise or a sniffle or to fish for a doctor's note to explain some absence or other.
But that doctor who was making sure the data was entered correctly?
Don't blame him.
There's always somebody waiting on his attention.
