#russian doctors

[scottbcrowley2]

Russian doctors, nurses face more risks as virus cases grow - Tue, 28 Apr 2020 PST

A patient who had routine surgery at a hospital in St. Petersburg suddenly developed a fever after an operation. Doctors insisted on testing him for coronavirus and results showed that ... Russian doctors, nurses face more risks as virus cases grow - Tue, 28 Apr 2020 PST

[russianreader]

Doctors at Petersburg Hospital Rebel over Coronavirus Unpreparedness Doctors at Pokrovskaya Hospital in Petersburg Rebel over Lack of Protective Equipment, Oxygen and Drugs Fontanka.ru…

[cup-of-red-tea]

Russian doctors are the kind of people who will be standing there with a bucket of water watching a person burn alive and won’t do anything until you pay them..

We may have free healthcare but good fucking luck trying to actually get it. WIthout dying from doctors doing something wrong delibarately out of spite because you didn’t bribe\tip them.

[akimosan-blog]

[newstfionline]

The Disturbing Reason Russia Has More Orphans

Olga Apelenova, Kommersant, Nov. 27, 2014

MOSCOW--Russia’s orphanage system is growing by about 6,000 newborns every year because of the rising number of parents who “refuse” their children in the maternity ward, typically because of disabilities.

“When my baby was born, I heard, ‘Look what you gave birth to,’” recalled one mother, Svetlana Doronina. “Those were the first words the doctor said. The doctor said I had given birth to a vegetable, that he would never walk or talk and that spending money on him was useless. We were not sent to Moscow for evaluation. And in order to get the free medicine I was entitled to, I had to write two articles in the local newspaper.”

Doronina, from Volgograd Oblast in western Russia, was recorded on video and shown recently in a meeting of the Guardianship Council, overseen by Vice Premier Olga Golodets. And this isn’t an experience she had in the 1990s: Her son was born in 2013. He suffers from hydrocephalus--a condition in which fluid accumulates in the brain--as well as other related diseases, but the child has a chance because his mother didn’t abandon him.

According to Russia’s Ministry of Health statistics, the situation in Volgograd Oblast is worse than the national average. The region has a high rate of both child disability and death. The Ministry of Health has sent experts to root out the reasons behind both of those statistics, but Doronina’s story explains a lot.

There are around 10 regions in the country with statistics that mirror those in Volgograd Oblast. But children are abandoned in maternity wards throughout Russia, with the exception of some North Caucasian republics. In 2013, 5,757 newborns were refused by their parents and in 2012, the number was 6,230.

The concerns about child abandonment in Russia come two years after a Moscow-Washington diplomatic row led to an ongoing Russian ban on adoptions by Americans, who are often more willing to adopt children with disabilities.

Specialists in preventing newborn abandonment all say that maternity wards don’t give women the necessary psychological and educational support they need. On the contrary, they often hear horrible prognoses related to newborns who have some sort of health problem.

Doctors in the maternity ward are often the ones who introduce the idea of abandonment--even when a mother hasn’t asked about it. In general, these doctors are not familiar with modern rehabilitation methods and the outcomes for disabled children who receive proper treatment, nor do they have any inkling of how the disabled can integrate into society.

These doctors think that disabled children are impossible to teach and that they don’t have a future, despite the fact that experiences in many European countries have proven otherwise.

“In the medical world, there is still an idea that refusing a problematic baby gives the mother a chance to return to a full life,” explains Elena Klochko, a Guardianship Council member. “But that’s incorrect. Research has shown that in 80% of cases the mothers who abandon their newborns have a series of physical and psychological problems, especially anxiety and depression.”

In 2013, 1.9 million children were born in Russia, and 623,000 had some kind of health problem. Specialists say that many diagnoses given to newborns are subsequently withdrawn in the baby’s first year of life, although there are no exact data on the topic. That means that a maternity doctor telling a mother that her baby will never walk or talk could very well be mistaken.

Ksenia Alferova, co-founder of a non-profit that deals with issues related to disabled children, says doctors are frequently wrong. “We have our own statistics, and we know of cases where the screening didn’t show anything but the child was born with a handicap, and other cases where the screening showed a high probability of Down’s syndrome, and the child was born normal,” she says. “In 2013, the number of abortions in Russia increased by 130% compared with 2012--because of prenatal screenings. Parents trust doctors absolutely.”

In most cases, women make the decision to abandon their child without having seen the baby, because doctors say that seeing the baby isn’t necessary. Experts who are working to prevent newborn abandonment say that specialists in the maternity ward should be required to provide contact between mothers and newborns.

Alferova says that new standards for maternity ward doctors could largely solve the problem of infant abandonment. “It’s too late to teach the current doctors,” she says. “They think that they are ‘saving’ the mother from a disabled baby. But we need to teach new specialists that that’s not right, so that they work under different assumptions. A lot depends on how the doctor tells the woman that her child has, for example, Down’s syndrome. Why does the doctor give her the news like it’s a tragedy? Children with Down’s syndrome can walk, talk, go to school. Why is that bad news? Is it just that they are different from others? We are all different from each other. If we were all identical, life would be pointless.”

Along with unethical behavior among doctors, the absence of professional psychological and social support for new moms has been cited as a reason for abandonment. There is also a common misconception that only poor, marginal parents have children with physical or psychological disabilities.

“That’s absolutely not the case, but stereotypes are hard to break,” Klochko explains. “A disabled child in a well-off family would be seen as a threat to the family’s status and reputation. That’s why society doesn’t judge harshly those who abandon disabled children. To a certain extent, society supports the decision. Correspondingly, it’s an easy procedure legally--much easier than adopting a child.” Klochko says that families raising a disabled child risk becoming isolated, and the divorce rate for couples with a disabled child is much higher than average.

More than half of the people with Down’s syndrome in Russia grow up in orphanages. They represent one of the largest categories of orphans because they are often abandoned in maternity wards and are rarely adopted. The orphanages don’t give them the pedagogical and social help that they need, and when they become adults they are often committed to mental institutions, where they often die as a result of the aggressive pressure from a new environment. At the same time, most people with Down’s syndrome are capable of attending regular schools, learning a job and living in society.

Around 2,500 babies are born with Down’s syndrome in Russia annually. Fifteen years ago, 95% of babies with Down’s syndrome were abandoned at the hospital, whereas today the figures are between 20% and 80%, depending on the region and city.

[newstfionline]

Russian doctor rebellion causes headache for Putin

By Nataliya Vasilyeva, AP, Nov 28, 2014

MOSCOW (AP)--Dr. Semyon Galperin spent a decade in medical research in Russia and as much time in the United States, working at top hospitals and research companies. Despite his expertise, Galperin was recently given a stark ultimatum from the Moscow hospital where he works: Leave or stay on as a lowly hospital attendant.

Galperin’s job is being eliminated as part of a sweeping reform in which at least 28 Moscow hospitals are to be closed and up to 10,000 medical staff fired, an overhaul that officials say is needed to modernize a decrepit Soviet-era health system. On Sunday, thousands of doctors and their patients are set to march against the reform as part of the first mass social protest in Russia in nearly a decade--a threat to President Vladimir Putin who faced down a wave of political protests launched in 2011 and is now struggling with a faltering economy.

The doctors’ rebellion started early this month, when thousands took to the streets to protest the layoffs and hospital closures. Last time a similar protest happened in 2005, Putin became so alarmed that within a week he overturned the scrapping of social benefits for millions of pensioners and the disabled, and in fact doubled pensions instead.

Aware of the potential fall-out of this protest, Putin last week asked the Moscow government to reconsider the reform as his human rights council hosted a round table discussion with prominent doctors and trade unions that were not consulted when the reform was launched.

At Moscow’s Hospital 11, Galperin is vowing to stay on even if that means working as an attendant: “I can’t leave work because we decided to fight till the end,” he said.

Moscow officials say they are only complying with a 2010 Russian law designed to help hospitals complete a transition from the Soviet-era economy and make them self-reliant by cutting budget subsidies to a minimum. Moscow Health Care Department spokeswoman Elina Nikolayeva defended the firings as inevitable: “Some of the doctors who are being fired are underqualified,” she said. “Some of them don’t have enough workload.”

The doctors’ unrest is particularly problematic for Putin because almost all of them are state employees--the core of his support base. Russia has enjoyed low unemployment of about 5 percent in the last decade because of heavy subsidies to state enterprises, schools and hospitals. Following the political protests, Putin won his third term office in 2012 largely because state employees believed in his promise to increase their living standards.

Now, that very promise seems to be backfiring.

Moscow officials are carrying out the health care reform in order to make good on Putin’s election pledge to boost the livelihoods of public servants--including a vow to make doctors’ salaries twice that of the average employee by 2018. Moscow Deputy Mayor Leonid Pechatnikov says that had it not been for Putin’s pledge, the health reform would not be so fast or brutal.

Moscow’s health care system is a relic of the communist health care system under which every citizen was entitled to free medical services. In a bid to save funds, Moscow health care officials are focusing on promoting neighborhood clinics that will provide comprehensive care and keep people out of hospital beds.

The reforms were not discussed with the medical community, however, and their details only became public in October following a leak in the press. Doctors and hospitals that found themselves in the vortex of the reform have not been told why they are being phased out or what is going to happen to their patients.

At Hospital 11 where Galperin works, 136 out of its 320 medical staff, mostly doctors, were given the notice and the hospital is to be shuttered by April.

Galperin says he was probably targeted because of his union activities: He was given notice the day after he made a speech at a trade union committee, demanding a fairer pay scheme. But other doctors who kept a low profile were given the boot, too.

Meanwhile, some patients fear that the reform will hurt them the most.

Ales Kochevnik, 29, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis two years ago. Treatment allows her to live a more or less a normal life, albeit one interrupted by fits that can leave parts of her body temporarily paralyzed.

“They taught me to walk five times,” the young artist says of Hospital 11. “It’s a scary disease. It can strike at any moment. A couple of times I was sitting with friends drinking coffee, and within 15 minutes it would strike.”

On a recent afternoon, Kochevnik went to Red Square to lay down on its cobbled pavement in protest. Supporters stood by, each carrying an IV drip. One held a poster reading: “A hospital without doctors is a mortuary.”

[wastelandmag]

[newstfionline]

Russia Stays Transfixed by a Switch at Birth

By Ellen Barry, NY Times, Nov. 1, 2011

MOSCOW--For several weeks, Russian television has followed the story of two 12-year-olds in the Siberian city of Kopeysk: pale, light-eyed Anya, who is being raised by a Tajik man according to the precepts of Islam; and black-haired Irina, the beloved daughter of an ethnically Russian blond woman.

They would have remained so if Irina's father had not been convinced that he had been cuckolded. His refusal to pay alimony led to a DNA test, which led, in turn, to the revelation that two girls, born within 15 minutes of each other to teenage mothers in adjacent hospital beds, had been delivered to the wrong women. Their story has spilled out on television, Jerry-Springer-style.

On Monday, a judge in the Chelyabinsk region awarded each family compensation of 3 million rubles, or about $100,000, an unusually high judgment in Russia. Yulia A. Belyayeva, who has raised the dark-haired girl as her own, said they would use the money to build houses next to each other, so they can look after the children together.

"You know what I wanted to say in my closing statement?" Ms. Belyayeva told reporters, after the verdict was read. "Give our children back to us, the way they should have been. Then we would have no need for money. No amount of money can be compared with the gaze of a child on her mother."

The case has stirred up complaints about Russia's "birth houses," high-volume operations where women are often treated brusquely. After Ms. Belyayeva's first interview, on the talk show "Let Them Speak," commentaries poured into the show's Web site from women who said they had caught nurses mixing up babies.

"You may laugh, but when I was giving birth to my first daughter, I kept a black marker in my hand, and as soon as she was born, I put a mark on her hand," wrote a woman named Yelena. Another viewer, also named Yelena, said she was not allowed to see her baby until a day afterward, and then she found him tagged with the wrong name. "I was yelling, 'Where is my baby?' and the answer I got was, 'Come on, Kopelevich, Korolevich, what's the difference?' "

Though similar cases have surfaced in recent years, courts have granted much smaller awards. The story of Irina and Anya stands out because the girls' parents have spoken compellingly about it. Naymat Iskanderov said when Ms. Belyayeva contacted him this fall, he at first refused to consider the possibility that Anya was not his biological child, but when he saw a photograph of Irina he "almost fainted." He showed up, carrying flowers, to meet Ms. Belyayeva.

"We sat in a pizzeria and wept and tried to figure out what to do," Ms. Belyayeva said. Later, when she laid eyes on her biological daughter, Ms. Belyayeva said she "wanted to grab her and run away as fast as I could."

When the case was first made public, the midwife who oversaw the ward when the two girls were born told a television reporter that she could never have done such a thing, though she went on to say that the babies' "last names were almost identical." A gynecologist at the Kopeysk maternity ward made a television appearance to give his side of the story, and he seemed reluctant to assign full responsibility to the hospital.

"To be honest, it is very difficult for me to understand how, after you have received your baby, after it was brought to your breast, how could you accept another baby that is brought to you," said the doctor, Aleksandr Andryenko, before he was shouted down by the studio audience.