MAN CHANGES THE WORLD (BUT NOT ALWAYS FOR THE BETTER) Children and adults

The domestic healthcare system is in terrible pain. This is something that outsiders and insiders agree on. The education system is collapsing. This is what people are discreetly saying on school corners. However all of the above things feel remote and impersonal as long as we"re talking about systems and things that don"t have a direct influence. The drama arises when you get to the people. The people inside the system.

Here is one example: you take your child and send him to school. He breaks his arm on his first physical education class. A brief visit to the doctor"s office, a phone call to the parents and that"s it. The education system doesn"t feel the need to interact with the healthcare system. The child is suffering and wants the mother and father to come quickly and take care of him. Who else would?

He is quickly taken to the nearest hospital: the Emergency University Hospital. At the emergency room, the parents are told that the hospital they"ve come to does not treat children. The child is suffering, but so is the doctor: he"s got a serious case of "couldn"t give a damn". He doesn"t even bother to see what the problem is. Since they just can"t take it anymore, the parents resort to a little trick and go directly to the orthopaedics department, by going around a few bored bodyguards. The outcome is the same: brutally honest, the second doctor tells them that he is not allowed to treat a minor, but he doesn"t do anything either to ease the child"s pain. Perhaps if they had gotten lucky at the emergency room, they would have been directed to a doctor willing to treat children. But this time, luck just wasn"t on their side.

The traffic is heavy, just like it usually is around noon. Sweating and nervous, the parents and their child get to the Emergency Clinic for Children "Marie Sklodowska Curie". At the triage room, the nurse is talking to her "hubby" on the phone, which makes her oblivious to anything around her for a few minutes. Talk about bad luck, while she"s on the phone, two adults show up, a driver and the victim of an accident. The latter is standing, but is in obvious pain, he"s got a head wound. "It"s a car accident, the child can wait, this was the nearest hospital they could come to. Where did you expect them to go?" The child"s parents have to concede; after all they couldn"t be that callous, could they? Their child doesn"t have any other issues besides his broken arm. Go ahead treat the victim of the accident. They eventually get a record and they can go to the orthopaedics department. Once they get there, they find several other children waiting. After 40 minutes of waiting, they"re told that the doctor is eating. They wait some more. The doctor sure likes to eat. Eventually they get inside the doctor"s office. Good thing it"s nothing serious, a few days in a cast and it will pass.

But will the deeper problems go away? Hard to believe. In the two hospitals, they"ve met plenty of people, but the system was broken.