Even money doesn't help: why Russians don't trust the healthcare system

Daria Voznesenskaya

According to The All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), more than half of Russians assess the healthcare system negatively. Only 9% have a positive opinion about it, the remaining 37% are satisfied with the quality of the services provided. The main pain points of medicine, according to the inhabitants of the country, are the lack of professionalism of doctors, the inaccessibility of medical care and the lack of modern equipment in hospitals.

In one way or another, all these problems were faced by the patients of the Infectious Diseases Hospital of the Stavropol Territory, once the leading medical institution in the region.

Let's start with the fact that perhaps the most egregious case in the entire period of the coronavirus pandemic occurred in the Stavropol Territory. Irina Sannikova, the chief freelance infectious disease specialist of the regional Ministry of Health, brought COVID-19 from Spain and became not only a "zero" patient, but also a defendant in a criminal case of negligence. Returning from the trip, she did not go into self-isolation, continuing to go to work and lecture at the university. A week later, Sannikova was hospitalized with bilateral pneumonia. She has already lost her job, in the future she may also lose her freedom - she faces up to 5 years in prison.

While going to work, Sannikova managed to infect several colleagues, including Lyubov Tsirikhova, a nurse of the regional clinical infectious diseases hospital. She was in the hospital for almost a month and a half. The saddest thing is that the woman was denied the payment required by law, writes NewsTracker.

It was not possible to recognize Tsirikhova as sick with coronavirus at work due to the fact that her incubation period was allegedly one day, and according to the methodological recommendations of the Ministry of Health, it should be at least two.

At the same time, according to the nurse, the protocol, which was signed by the commission, indicated that she had been in contact with the infected for two days. But no one took this into account. The woman also said that initially she did not want to be diagnosed with coronavirus, the documents wrote “community-acquired pneumonia”.

“I was not the only one who did not receive payments. The medical staff who got infected with me were also left without money. They did not even begin to apply for payment, because they were hinted that in this case they would be left without work”, - Tsirikhova said.

While the issue of payments remains open. But there are more than enough problems in the once leading center of Stavropol. So, one of the residents said that on August 7, her elderly parents had a fever and began to have breathing problems. Suspecting a coronavirus, she called an ambulance. There, the woman was told that they could come to the call only if the family had an agreement with the infectious diseases hospital. But even in this case, it would have to wait 4 hours. The woman did not risk the health of her parents and took them to a medical facility herself. By hook or by crook, older people still managed to get into the infectious diseases clinic.

Then the worst began. My father had a hypertensive crisis, and he almost died of a heart attack. “I started sounding the alarm, calling the attending physician, but no one responded. On the morning of August 19, my mother called me and said that my father felt bad, that she herself knocked down his pressure as much as she could, since my mother was a doctor”, - said the daughter of pensioners.

According to her, the doctors stated that infectious diseases were treated in the infectious diseases department, and not the heart. The woman started calling the managers, the cardiology center, and even reached the ministers ... As a result, the doctors of the regional hospital were ready to operate on their father, the only thing left was for the ambulance to receive consent to transport the infectious diseases from the head physician. But she delayed the process, arguing that there was no reason for panic.

This story, fortunately, ended well. The man was still operated on. But the count went on for minutes, a little more - and he could die due to aortic thrombosis.

Such a negligent attitude towards parents (the mother never had an ECG, although she had a pacemaker installed and she was treated with only two injections), the woman associates with the fact that she did not pay for free treatment.

“I got the impression from my parents' stories that this is a hospital where everything is put on a cash flow. If you pay, we will treat, if you do not pay, we will not. And when I was looking for options on how to get into the infection, many acquaintances told me: well, if you go out on and. about. the head physician and pay 50 thousand rubles per person, then the parents will be treated and taken to the hospital in three seconds”, - says a resident of Stavropol.

Her version is confirmed by another Stavropol woman, whose 8-year-old son was admitted to the same hospital with a fever, rash and poor liver parameters. She said that at first she paid the doctor 3,000 rubles for free treatment. When the child got worse - another 5 thousand rubles. In addition, once a week the woman paid for antiviral drugs - 12 thousand rubles.

At the same time, the quality of treatment in the infectious diseases department still left much to be desired. The child's temperature rose from the antibiotic prescribed by the doctor and a rash began. According to the woman, the doctors "were guessing on the coffee grounds" what diagnosis to give the boy. Because of their lack of professionalism, they prescribed about 16 different drugs, but nothing helped, and the liver of the little patient was systematically poisoned.

“I don’t know where and how she studied, but I don’t think she is a good, qualified doctor. She simply ruined our child's health”, - says the woman about Natalya Yatsenko, an employee of the infectious diseases hospital.

After the "treatment", the boy was sent to a hospital in Moscow. There he was finally diagnosed with toxic hepatitis. This disease could have been caused by just the same wrong treatment in the Stavropol Territory. In addition, later the child was diagnosed with diabetes mellitus, which could also be the result of toxic effects on the liver.

Obviously, such cases are typical not only for the Stavropol Territory. So, the other day in the central city hospital of Bataysk (Rostov region) a one-year-old child died. According to the mother's story, at first they put him on a dropper and gave him medicine, which was impossible and from which the child vomited. Then a double dose of the antibiotic was administered. After that, the baby became worse - he began to choke, the temperature rose. The first time the child's heart stopped, he was resuscitated, but he died a few hours later.

“During 12 hours of being in the Central Regional Hospital of Bataysk, from a state of slight malaise, my son was brought to death,” the mother of the deceased baby told “Notebook”. On this fact, a criminal case was initiated on causing death by negligence.

Or, for example, in the fall of last year in the Nizhny Novgorod region, the chief physician of the Balakhna central regional hospital, Maxim Kudykin, and the surgeon of the Emergency Hospital in Dzerzhinsk, Andrey Vasyagin , were detained on suspicion of extorting money from patients for free medical services.

“This doctor loves money, but he is not responsible for his operations. The main thing for him is to transfer the money to the account of some left-wing firm, like Antey, which is bankrupt, and he is not interested in the outcome of the operation", - wrote the then victim Konstantin Shilkin.

After the criminal case initiated by the investigators, the prosecutor's office of the Nizhny Novgorod region held a "hot line", according to the results of which it became known that this fact of corruption in the medical institutions of the region is far from the only one.

Increasingly, you can hear from the elderly that they do not want to go to hospitals because they do not trust doctors. This is quite understandable, because for several years in a row in-hospital mortality has been growing in Russia. The Health Foundation explains this not only by the hospitalization of patients with severe illness and elderly citizens, but also by the low availability of medical care, non-core hospitalizations, as well as the belated start of medical care for vascular pathologies.