Dr. J- Rant Of The Day

I work with a rather, uh, charismatic doctor here. He likes going off on rants about various subjects from time to time, that range from the incompetence of some staff to the living conditions of Chinese workers in Gabon. His chosen subject the other day was the state of medicine in Gabon. Which is: not good. The government has been unable (or unwilling) to pay its bills to the hospitals for quite some time, and the result is that all of the hospitals have been on strike since January. (Not this one, it’s funded mostly by international foundations.) So the result of the strike is that sick people are not getting medical care, then when they’re gravely ill, they come here (to the HAS: Hôpital Albert Schweitzer), where often it’s too late (Dr. J-: "Do they think we're magicians?!"). The HAS has also been relatively overwhelmed with patients since the strike started: the maternity service has patients on mats on the floor, because they’re out of both beds and mattresses (“Patients are on the floor, four to a room! That is no way to treat people”). The medicine service sometimes keeps patients in maternity and surgery because there are no medicine beds left. It is frustrating that the government is unwilling to pay for medical care for its citizens, and it’s easy to place blame on any number of factors for the fact that people are suffering and dying of treatable diseases simply because there are no resources available to them, so his next statement caught me off guard: “And who is responsible for this?? We all are.”