distrust

There is this lady, whom I will refer to as K., that works in the basement of the hospital. She is possibly one of the most fascinating people I've encountered, because she holds the most deeply rooted distrust of the health care system out of anyone I know.

I've had the opportunity to have several conversations with K. because when products come to our unit, they have to go through her department before it gets to ours. Once, a few weeks ago, she was bringing up a set of catheters and some angiography trays and we started discussing how if she became afflicted with a major disease, she would rather be placed on compassionate care or tossed in a coffin than be subjected to the horrors of the clinical therapies established or experimental. Her words were, "Medicine can't cure - it only tries to."

When you think of a statement like that, you begin to wonder whether K. is simply paranoid. Of course medicine can't cure many things, but that is not really medicine's intent. Ideally, medicine would like to cure, but otherwise it's about aiding a person in overcoming an affliction to the best of the physician's ability and judgment. It's scary, because a lot of the time procedures carry risks or have a very low rate of success. I can understand K.'s distrust in the results procedures produce, but it's really dependent on the disease, the procedure, and the stage the disease is at. Pathology is multifactorial in nature, and similarly many factors factor into the treatment. Yet K. seems to paint health care all with the same wary paintbrush.

K. also has issues with the way the system is being run (and I think similar feelings of resentment exist for all health care workers currently under AHS - another story?). She's an activist of sorts, and claims to post questions about AHS' doctrine regarding topics of accountability and transparency on Health Minister Stephen Duckett's blog. These concerns surround policies like AHS' recent "can't speak bad about AHS" policy, which just recently sacked an AHS employee for writing a letter of complaint to the board. K. also says that the moderators on the blog site censor anything bad that anyone says on it; her comments have been swiftly removed. Doesn't it seem ironic that a company promoting accountability and transparency censors and shades?

She was quick, however, to mention that it may not be Duckett at fault, but rather some overzealous moderators with itchy backspace key fingers. On the other hand, K. has no qualms about ranting on the suits at AHS corporate. She was just on her way back from coffee break yesterday and went downstairs into the film library. There, she was accosted by a group of suits standing there looking at her wall. Anyone who goes into the film library has to get the consent of her supervisor, because obviously you can easily break confidentiality by just rustling through a few files, of which there are several years worth in there. These gentlemen had simply let themselves in without informing anyone of their presence or intent, and were discussing the building of a tunnel through the film library to connect the new Edmonton Clinic with the U of A Hospital. This was all brand new news to everyone in the storage department, but because the suits say so, radiology is going to have to move a fair percentage of their films somewhere else.

While K.'s stance is obviously extreme in nature, it poses an interesting perspective. How much can we truly trust the health care system? It seems that every tier has its issues. I applaud AHS for recognizing the need to consolidate all the entities into one supergroup in order to streamline processes and make health care one gigantic functional superorganism, yet it seems like they have a long way to go before health care workers and general public alike hold solid trust in the ventures and endeavours of AHS.