On Thursday, my sister went into hospital for surgery to remove her gallbladder which had a pretty massive gall stone in it. This was after three years of pain and nausea, two years of not knowing what was causing it and six months of being on the waiting list to get the surgery. My mum and her best friend took her up to the hospital at 11am, but she didn’t get into surgery until 2pm and didn’t arrive on the ward for recovery until 6:30pm.
She was discharged at 2pm yesterday (Friday), only to end up back in the emergency department at 7:30pm where we had to wait until close to 10pm for a surgeon to come and assess her. It was 11pm when we left her in her new ward. She was classified as a failed discharge, meaning they discharged her before she ready. She came home at 12pm today (Saturday).
Over a three day period, my family have made seven trips to the hospital, spent over $20 in parking fees and waited for a total of 12 hours.
I think you probably get where I’m going with this: I am not a fan of the public health system.
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It’s not just this one-off experience that has soured my view though. My own experience with the public health system hasn’t been very good either. Since my diagnosis of ME in October 2006, I have received very minimal help from any GP I’ve seen. My current GP is fairly understanding of my illnesses, but still can’t do much for me because treatments which have at least a little evidence backing them up as being helpful are not subsidised by the government.
In the SEVEN FUCKING YEARS I’ve been ill, I’ve not been able to get a referral to anyone who has even the vaguest idea about either of my illnesses. I’ve also not been able to access medication which have been used in the treatment of ME and fibro because public health GPs do not prescribe anything that costs more then $5 per prescription.
And now that I’m already sick, I cannot get health insurance to cover the cost of going to a private GP and/or a specialist. So basically, I’m screwed. Health insurance companies are unlikely to cover me for anything because my “pre-existing condition” is the cause of 95% of my health problems. The reason health insurance companies are allowed to do this is because the public health system exists.
It’s unbelievably frustrating to live somewhere which makes everyone pay for a system that only works for a certain group of people, and even then, it works so slowly that people are suffering for a lot longer than they need to be. It’s really fucking difficult to be a productive member of society when the services which are meant to be helping me get healthy so I can work, well, don’t.
By the way, my sister is okay. She’s in as much pain as you’d expect someone to be in after keyhole surgery and her nausea is under control, but it still shouldn’t have taken 3 years and all the rigmarole she went through at the hospital for her to get to this point.
