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Soweta born Dr. Maria Phalime: Why I stopped being a doctor.
[Cape Argus] Cape Town - GF Jooste Hospital, in the heart of the Cape Flats, had a phenomenal reputation as the training ground for skilled doctors and so I was thrilled when I was offered a community-service post there. After two months on the wards, I moved to the casualty unit. I joined a team of four doctors and it didn't take long for me to figure out what was expected of me and my colleagues. Sure, we were required to save lives, but the real measure of our success in the unit was our ability to assess and manage patients quickly, refer them elsewhere, and create space for more to come in. This task, however, was not as straightforward as it seemed, because as hard as we were working to offload patients, the people we were referring them to were as reluctant to accept them. Every day we engaged in endless haggling with medics, surgeons, gynaes, psychiatrists and, in moments of desperation, social workers to justify why they needed to take over the care of these patients. No one wanted the additional burden on their already overflowing workloads. Welcome to government run healthcare. Posted by: Besoeker 2014-05-07 |
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