I chose my cultural presentation topic of the Polish health care system in part because of my personal interest in the medical field, but also because of the numerous stories that my language partner had shared with me of her recent experiences in Polish hospitals with her brother. She described that after her brother's brain aneurism and subsequent surgery to remove a piece of his skull so that his brain could swell and then return to normal that her brother was not properly cared for in the hospital where he was being treated. Nurses went days without caring for him and checking to see if he was responsive after the surgery resulting in complications that required her family to seek the attention of medical specialists and embark on even more dangerous procedures to fix the damage caused by his neglect.
In my research, I expected to find that her brother's predicament was the result of a poorly equipped and poorly trained staff that was indicative of the Polish health care system. This assumption turned out to be horribly predicated upon the tumultuous history of Poland as a nation which it was able to successfully climb back from in a rather short amount of time since its separation from the Soviet Union. My research thus left me puzzled as to why my language partner's brother had received such poor statistics when all government documents and statistics that I found suggested that the Polish healthcare system was extremely successful and becoming even more so with each passing year.
These statistics, I discovered, completely ignored the widespread back-door dealings that the Polish health care system revolved around in order to boost the appearance of Poland among the world community. In actuality there exists a certain type of accepted black market that revolves around selling the services and attentions of doctors and nurses alike for exorbitant bribes. In this system, the cultural norm is to provide the physician and staff caring for a patient with an "envelope payment" to ensure that one receives the best quality care. This cultural practice suggests that the bribe which my language partner's family may have presented to the nurses in the hospital where her brother was being treated may have paled in comparison to what other individuals in the hospital were paying and as a result, the nurses entirely neglected him and his condition, leaving him to suffer permanent brain damage and possibly even death.
This method of conducting health care and its cultural acceptance in Poland utterly disgusts me as someone who plans to enter the medical field. I have always conceived of the practice of medicine as one of helping people regardless of their ability to pay for their treatment as reflected by the hypocratic oath that every doctor must take. I can somewhat understand that in a country where the government does not provide adequate aid for medical practices to exist, doctors and nurses alike are forced to resort to such measures as taking bribes but I in no way see how a rationalization like this can lead one to simply allow one to neglect a patient with a clean conscience. However, if a solution exists to this dilemma it lies not within attempting to change what has become the cultural norm of the Poles who have accepted "envelope payments" as necessary evils but rather in the redistribution of government wealth. In America, the percentage of government spending that is spent on health care is over 12 times that of Poland and for a nation that has successfully reestablished itself economically, educationally and otherwise in its era of peace since the Cold War, perhaps it is time that the government cease projecting the appearance of adequate medical care to the world and begin the slow process of providing for the physical needs of its populace.
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