Comment

Added hoops help hospitals jump ahead

By Wu Wencong (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-22 07:58

On my first day in London, I received the fabulous news that I could enjoy free healthcare during my stay in Britain. About one month later, I got the chance to experience the famous National Healthcare System (NHS) firsthand.

I found it amazingly inefficient.

I started to itch all over my body on my fifth week in the UK. Day and night I scratched and had trouble falling asleep. In a word, I was terribly in need of a doctor.

Naturally, I thought of the lovely free NHS, which covers all British taxpayers and anyone who holds a residency permit. Whoever you are, wherever you are from, rich or poor, you'll get the same free medical treatment after registration with a general practitioner, or GP.

However, according to NHS, I could not go directly to a hospital because my condition did not constitute an emergency such as acute poisoning, coma or severe injury. My case did not fit any of those situations, therefore, I needed to visit my GP first, and let him decide whether I needed a specialist at a hospital.

So I went to the school clinic to see my GP. There I was told I needed a reservation first. To my surprise, the closest available date was eight days later.

I made a reservation anyway, but could not stand the itch for one more day, let alone another seven.

I decided to help myself. I Googled my symptom for explanations and called my friends in medical school for advice. Finally, I self-diagnosed the trouble as allergic dermatitis. Four days after taking the medicine recommended for the malady, I was cured.

Two days before the reservation with the GP, the itch was gone.

It is hard not to get ill in a foreign country, especially when you live on campus with students coming from as many as 150 countries. However since then, I never went to my GP. Instead, I had cured myself through fevers, coughs and sore throats.

I don't want to mock the NHS for its ineffectiveness, though I think it is indeed far too inefficient. However, I perceive it as a good idea that the Chinese medical system to learn partly from NHS - making our comprehensive hospitals slightly less "effective" to better allocate limited public health resources.

Chinese people have an unusual fever for comprehensive hospitals. You can tell from the long queues in several famous hospitals and the empty halls of community hospitals.

Does everyone in the queue need a diagnosis or surgery that could only be provided by a comprehensive hospital? What if they just have some simple, minor symptoms such as a sore throat or cough? Some of them can definitely be treated at the community hospitals. The problem is that they choose not to go there.

Imagine what would happen if we learned from NHS and raise the threshold for treatment at our comprehensive hospitals. Only when a reservation is necessary or when a diagnosis from a community hospital is compulsory, will see fewer people lining up as the process becomes more complex.

Most likely, some people with less-severe illnesses could cure themselves, just as I did in London, to avoid the long wait. Others might turn to community hospitals and find their problems solved easily.

As a result, the public would have more faith in community hospitals, and our comprehensive hospitals would be less crowded. Let's make our comprehensive hospitals less "efficient".