|
medpundit |
||
 |
 |
|
Saturday, April 26, 2003A chronically harassed, understaffed, underequipped system reaches reflexively for routine diagnoses, prescriptions. Did Kwan Sui-Chu's doctor, an Asian Canadian herself with many Asian patients, get the Toronto Public Health alert? Is it normal for coroners to mark "heart attack" as cause of death for elderly patients even when they've been prescribed antibiotics for a new condition in the last week? Why, after Scarborough admitted Mr. Pollack, whom they knew to have been infected during his previous stay with them, did they allow Mrs. Pollack to circulate among other patients? Why did Scarborough compound its own carelessness by infecting York Central? Most of what went wrong could have been discovered by a few social pleasantries: How's the family? Been travelling recently? The so-called "bedside manner" isn't just to cheer you up, it's meant to provide the doctor with information that will assist his diagnosis. In Canadian health care, coiled tight as a spring, there's no room for chit-chat: give her the antibiotics, put it down as a heart attack, stick him on a gurney in the corridor for a couple of days. Maybe you could get service as bad as this in, oh, a Congolese hospital. But in most other Western health care systems the things Ontario failed to do would be taken for granted. There might be a lapse at some point in the chain but not a 100% systemic failure all the way down the line. As tempting as it is to jump on that bandwagon, I’m afraid I can’t. The truth is that all of those things can, and do, go on here in our private healthcare system. Overworked doctors with crammed schedules, overworked coroners, reflex prescriptions for antibiotics - they aren’t unique to Canada. The truth is, it could have happened anywhere, even here. It’s true that the WHO began tracking the illness that turned out to be SARS in mid-February, but it wasn’t until March 12 that they issued a health alert. The first Canadian patient saw her doctor on February 28 and died on March 5. No primary care doctor anywhere in the world (except maybe China or Hong Kong) would have suspected SARS then, even with a travel history. The second victim, son of the first, became ill on March 5 and died on March 13. Again, no one would have suspected SARS on March 5. No one would have known about it. Even the later case in which the wife of a victim wasn’t quarantined isn’t a terrible blunder. That was on March 16, when the WHO was still describing the disease as less communicable than it has turned out to be. Although, one would have thought that her son would have taken his respiratory symptoms a little more seriously and stayed home from that religious retreat. The Canadian health system may have a lot wrong with it, but in the case of SARS, it was just a victim of unfortunate timing. posted by Sydney on 4/26/2003 08:10:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
|
