Doctors, probably enough - let's get together June 6We doctors can no longer sit with their hands in the lap - we suggest that all doctors in the country on Thursday, June 6, 2019 take free from practice and hospital clinics and meet to discuss what the heck we must do to be able to take care of our work again.
Based on a deeply sad single story brought in Politiken, Liselott Blixt recently, along with a united parliament, banned us from saying that people with chronic fatigue syndrome have a functional disorder. This has made it difficult for us to treat these people with the only treatment that has been shown to have a small effect on their disease. Prior to this, she decided how to treat our metabolic patients with a preparation derived from dried pork glands (similar to the treatment given to these patients in the 1950s) . This with the words "It should ultimately not be the doctors to decide whether a patient should be treated with Thyroid".
Region Midtjylland has made a plan according to which all the smaller specialist practices, which today see patients to a course price of approx.1.400 units / pieces, must be closed and their patients instead treated by non-existent capacities at the hospitals. This is because "The Region will emphasize that the specialties and functions where today there is a coincidence between what is going on in the hospital and in specialist practice are to a greater extent taken care of by the hospitals". The medical or economic rationale for this peculiar proposal does not appear - for example, the DRG rate for neurological assessment in the hospital regime of something as simple as a concussion in 2018 is set at just over DKK 19,000.
Liselott Blixt & Co also decided - possibly at the request of interest groups who want free cannabis - that we, on a soluble indication despite a noisy lack of solid scientific evidence, must print our patients medical cannabis, a drug with a biological half-life of 48 hours. Although no one knows anything about interactions with other drugs or long-term side effects (besides the abundant psychiatric experience with cannabis users). This on our medical responsibility of course. For being a patient psychotic, running wrong in a cannabis rest or getting a threatening condition triggered by an unknown interaction between his other medicine and cannabis, we must be ready for a police report and subsequent personal trial.
In the background, the politically upgraded STPS is waiting for. Parate to prosecute anyone who comes to terms with their clinical practice desk rules.Rules that have very little to do with the clinical reality. And as the unfortunate case in Svendborg shows, STPS will go a long way after a criminal case against the youngest reserve doctor, rather than go after the hospital administration and departmental management (or ultimately, the politicians) who were responsible for the hopeless working conditions that were the real cause of the mistakes made.
Throughout Eastern Denmark, colleagues are sitting today and are struggling with a medical system, made for an American health service that works per invoice and in an outdated program language. The Capital Region of Denmark with Vibeke Storm at the forefront wanted for some unclear reasons, namely an EPR system made by the software developer Jutland. A system that was otherwise made specifically for Danish conditions and which works virtually without problems west of the Great Belt. The final price of the Healthcare Platform from the US Epic is estimated to be around three billion. For this price, the Capital Region could have purchased the entire Systematic. Even twice!
And several years before this: 'The specialist with the front'. A political initiative that has ensured that all patients who are currently admitted urgently must be supervised by a specialist. Above all, as before, a guardian who was able to confer backwards to a specialist in case of doubt. Today, various specialist doctors spend the night in chambers or chatting around in the night hours and treat physically simple problems, which ten years ago was completely managed by trainee candidates. With the result that the same specialist doctors can no longer man the special ambulances during the day because of the delay of their night watch hours. These outpatients must today be manned by the trainee candidates, who otherwise have to take care of all the patients who are referred from typically far more experienced general practitioners to a specialist assessment at the hospital. Huh, where it goes, you are tempted to say. For the longer term, this scheme means that in ten to fifteen years, when the old experienced specialist doctors have retired, we will be faced with a lot of new specialist doctors who - unlike their predecessors - have never tried to stand alone with one acute bad patient. And - worse - don't have an experienced back guard to contact to know what to do.
Something has gone amusingly wrong.
This is not to be understood as though we do not understand and feel with the patients we are unable to adequately support their suffering. It is unquestionably certainly horrible of having ME / chronic fatigue syndrome, a poorly controlled low metabolism or chronic pain. We understand that these patients are requesting more effective treatment. We also understand that the same patients sometimes get angry with us - maybe even distrustful - when we tell them that this treatment is not yet available and therefore perhaps even in a desperate hope goes for various alternative solutions online and elsewhere where you promise them various miracle treatments. We all understand this.
But we have to say when opportunistic politicians abuse these patients' anger and frustration and support them in a perception of an unconscious and arrogant 'white brotherhood' that only real-life television shows are found in the real world. For so without professional insight and against all evidence, driven by press-appropriate single stories and own belly feeling, by law we force us to give the same patients a requested but perhaps useless or even harmful treatment.
It is also okay that we, as doctors, like all other professional groups, must join us during a public administration and its overall planning of the common good.But we should not accept overtly inappropriate actions, without financial or professional background, just because it looks good on an Excel sheet in an organizational chart and might be able to facilitate the central administration in their administrative tasks. Inept and unscrupulous doctors must be stopped.Rather yesterday than today. But not by the fact that STPS, after clear system errors, goes after the man instead of the ball.
In horror that we may accidentally end up in their goats, doctors are ordering more and more redundant examinations today to keep their backs free. More and more of our time is spent on various control forms and treatment standards, while the journals are filled with incalculable questionnaires and legal lirumlarum, so we can't get stuck on anything. Whenever an unfortunate mistake so happens, the political automatic response is more control systems and more standards.
In their eagerness to show empowerment, our politicians completely forget that all that control is not free. As a result, more and more working hours are being used for documentation and control, rather than treating patients. None of these control systems have proven to save quite a few - if any, at all. But the lack of treatment that this silly redistribution of limited health resources has resulted in has damaged many.
Something must happen. If we just take responsibility for our patients roughly, we can no longer sit with our hands in the lap. We will therefore propose that all doctors in the country on Thursday, June 6, 2019 take free from our practices and hospital clinics and meet, so that we can all discuss what the heck we must do to be able to fit our work again.
Enough is enough. Let the doctors be doctors.
