Feb 25th, 2018 : European Medical

While looking through TYWKIWDBI I saw this picture of a Romanian hospital room.



OK, Eastern European, poor, post Soviet country. But following the link to Reddit the discussion on the sad
state of their government provided healthcare and the necessity of bribing doctors and nurses to get service
was disheartening.
Others from neighboring countries also complained about having to bribe and government funds being stolen.



OK, still poor, Eastern European, post Soviet countries. But what shocked me most was the people from
Scandinavian countries making the same complaint of bribes and corruption.

With the Scandi nations, it looks from that thread that there was a serious mismanagement of resources for ideological reasons - tying their health services into ultimately catastrophic public-private financing agreements

We did the same here with public private hospital newbuilds as a quick fire solution to the problem of very old hospitals becoming unusable at an alarming rate (mainly due to chronic underfunding meaning necessary repairs and maintenance slipped in favour of front line service).

As yet, we haven't reached the bribery and corruption stage of things in terms of accessing healthcare - but I suspect (and there have been murmurings about this for some time) a degree of corruption in how contracts are awarded to private providers when the NHS farms out some element of care/support

What concerns me about that is that some of the people developing policy around NHS services and the relationship between public and private hehalthcare are themselves connectd in various ways to the private healthcare sector