Charlotte Grimshaw is an Auckland author and critic.
OPINION: In the cafe, B said, “Everyone complains about the public health system. But my mother was in Auckland City Hospital for seven weeks, and I rate her care as 99.9% excellent.”
Like B, I’ve had contact with public hospitals lately and, like him, I’ve been impressed by the care. A recent experience with a private clinic was starkly different. During visits to undergo laser treatment for a facial scar, I encountered, for the first time in my life, a doctor with a spectacularly bad bedside manner.
He seemed competent, but so rude I was fascinated. If he’d appeared in fiction, you’d have thought him an exaggeration. After various displays of impatience, hard sell and almost frantic cupidity, he entered the room quietly after my eyes had been covered and, without any preamble or warning, shot me in the face with his laser. Like the typical Kiwi diner who’s been served an appalling meal (yeah, no, great, thanks), I butched the moment out, weeping silently under my blindfold.
He finished his work, swept out, then burst back in, elaborately expressing displeasure. He needed the room, and I should have been hustled out quicker. Payment had been extracted upfront.
Last month, across town, I called an ambulance for my old friend N, and rode in it with him to the ED. The paramedics kept up a stream of jolly banter. Tolerantly, benignly, they listened to N’s rambling, his occasional songs. They dispensed care and advice: “Only you, N, can turn this around. The help is there for you!” In the ED, the treatment was similarly kind and prompt, as N and I whiled away the afternoon hours.
In recent days, I followed another ambulance, this time carrying M, and heading to Auckland City Hospital. Again, there was humane treatment and attentive care, first in the clinical decision unit, its cubicles densely packed with complication and suffering and waves of stupendous smells (entering at one point, I wondered if the drains had exploded). And then in general medicine ward 67: up there, the sun streams in and you can look out over Grafton Gully as the Westpac rescue helicopter silently lands on the roof below.
Many of the patients of ward 67 were rational and long-suffering. But there was intense life going on in there, and the staff soldiered through it with great forbearance. One patient threatened the nurses as she cycled volubly between terror and rage. Another, beautifully coiffed and made up, stood at the front desk swearing and repeating a demand for action that had already been taken. She shouted, “Eyebrows have been raised about my treatment!”
Two prisoners walked slow circuits of the ward, each attached to a Corrections officer by a metre-long chain. The mood was amiable, as if guards and inmates were enjoying the change of scene. One morning, a prisoner sat in the large, mysterious dermatological bathtub at the end of the corridor, his chain snaking out from behind the curtain, while at the other end, his guard lounged, and they chatted. I passed a Corrections officer carrying a bunch of flowers.
The staff worked hard. It was all free. Do we know how lucky we are? Recently, I saw the bill for a couple of emergency-room visits for a US citizen in Los Angeles: US$27,000. We should value what we have. I would pay higher taxes to support it.
Among the hospital workers, I saw patience, humour and kindness. When the time came to leave, an orderly pushed M’s wheelchair out to the car, chatting the whole time. He was a great guy; they all were, and I salute them.
