Tuesday, January 09, 2007

is private treatment better?

at around 4 pm today, I was asked to review a patient referred from a private hospital for retroviral illness that was recently diagnosed! The reason why I need to see this patient particularly was .....urgent changes need to be set!!

The patient came all the way from Medan, visit ted local private hospital for treatment twice and was not counselled properly for Anti retroviral treatment, so he happily took his medicine one at a time, and took wrong dose, wrong timing, and wrong way!! Now he had to pay the price of creating resistant virus and made his regime less potent at present....was it his fault? Or was this the Private Physician who earned lots and lots of money from these patient but yet did not give proper counselling and proper treatment for those who had paid them???

This was not my first encounter and within the last month, I had been receiving 3 or more such cases from private physician, either they had sucked their patient dried of money only then they referred to me, or when the patient was too ill and will increase their mortality rate in their hospital, I was really frustrated with this situation!

Anyway, my duty is to serve the public, so does not matter whether I am OK or not, I will still provide my best care....so call best if I can in this shortage of man power in general hospital! Just wish there is some private physician with more ethic will refer those patient earlier before damage is done! The patient will be the one who suffers!

1 comment:

PenanGHite said...

I totally agree the tedious task of commencing someone on Anti-HIV medications needs a properly trained, and experienced, ideally an Infectious Disease specialist, and this should be addressed in a national level so that not just any tom, dick and harry doctor can begin Anti-retroviral therapy, and contribute to treatment failure and resistant HIV strains!