Health
Life is good?
By: Raluca Andrei
Young Romanian doctor, Raluca Andrei, kicks off a new column on the trials, tribulations and frustrations of life inside Romania's medical system
Posted: 15/01/2010
"To be a doctor in Romania is like wanting a puppy when you are young, receiving it, loving it, wanting it to love you, and one day waking up and finding him no longer there."
- Raluca Andrei
Like myself, there are many fortunate young doctors practicing medicine, with a drive to learn, to feel, and to pursue a "noble" profession that will enrich their lives and those in need. However, living in Bucharest the past several years has taught me otherwise.
About a year and a half ago I met a brilliant, skilled, young doctor from Moldova, who had recently finished his residency program and works full time at one of the hospitals in Bucharest. He is the right hand of a chief surgeon there. Practiced in many surgical specialties, the chief surgeon allows a young, skilled doctor to "help" him. I don't wish to cloud your vision: help here means doing 80 per cent of all that goes on in the operating room. While that sounds normal for the first five years that you are learning and training, it might not sound so promising when you are approaching your tenth, eleventh year, and you are married with a child. So what happens next? Lets say you are bright and skilled with a will to work. You stick close to your chief, hoping that after being his personal slave for ten years, he might want to reward you with a position in the hospital. (Did I forget to mention that there is no paycheck after the first five years? In many cases if you are a "foreign" student/resident there is no sign of a paycheck even during your first five years - but we'll let that slide for now.) Hoping and dreaming is for artists my father used to say. Today is the day I realise he might have known more of what he was talking about than I had thought.
So you get up in the morning, drink your cup of Yogi tea, read your horoscope and pursue the hospital one more day in the hope of acquiring that position. And so the years pass and you realise that there are patients admitted daily, cured weekly, the hospital is awarded it's fair share from the "National House for Health Insurance ", you are respected, talented and without you some things might not run so smoothly (for an intervention to take place at least two surgeons must participate). However, you realise that you are part of what I call the Romanian Black Market Doctors Union - RBMDU. Apart from you, there are many, perhaps 60-70 per cent of the "staff" of doctors working in your specialty. If you were to ask them politely to not show up to work the following day, you might find yourself in a very sombre situation, where patients would be admitted with only one or two doctors around - unable to fulfill their duties and leaving a whole lot of operations on standby.
We Romanians wonder why our young doctors flee the country, but whose fault is it that we show up daily to work, hoping someone might be honest? We need to be told "Yes, starting tomorrow, you're hired" or "No, we're sorry, we're fully staffed". Why can't they be honest? The hospital receives its fair share, patients are cured, the senior doctors keep their status and nobility in society, but young doctors receive just a few breadcrumbs.
To be a doctor in Romania is like wanting a puppy when you are young, receiving it, loving it, wanting it to love you, and one day waking up and finding him no longer there.
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