Anna Gołębicka: Welcome to the dentist world

Ideals displaced by the market in the wrong sense are falling apart. Those at the bottom do not want to win the loser competition again and leave, the ones at the top know that this process is ultimately even useful for them. In the middle of it all, there is a patient who tries to save himself somehow. The argument at the SOR does not bring anything, a grudge against the minister who appears on TV too. The patient cries and pays. Or he just dies in the silence of his home.

For many years the system stuck to it mainly because it was standard to work in several places. Research on HRM before the pandemic showed that as many as 17.7% of doctors worked in four places, and only 24% of doctors in one. Undoubtedly, we were dealing with a paradoxical phenomenon in the economic context, because the scarce resource did not generate a higher price for itself, but "multiplied" by itself. Such a custom, model, standard? It was like that anecdote about slicing a cutlet on one side. In one family, women always cut off the end of a cutlet. The newly acquired son-in-law asked his wife what was going on? She told him that her mother always did. Mom said Grandma did it. Grandma said that great-grandmother did that. The son-in-law reached the great-grandmother and asked: great-grandmother, why did you cut off the end of the pork chop for frying? Because I only had a tiny pan and the chops didn't fit. And so it was in our native health care. In this profession, everyone worked in several places and there were the fewest doctors per 1000 inhabitants in Europe, but somehow it was not so visible. Everyone worked in several places, so 100 doctors were turned into two hundred jobs and the employer did not have a knife to his throat to pay more. The medics were tired, frustrated, sometimes rude, sometimes shortcuts - so you know who was to blame in the eyes of the patient.

The stick in the spokes of this "perpetual motion machine" was put by a pandemic. When the media reported that the main "missionary" in the background, he hadn't forgotten to take care of his interests, and he wasn't alone in it - the commotion, mission and sacrifice turned out to be a loser contest. Disappearing cover additions only exacerbated this bad situation and no one wants to "heal anyway".

There is a shortage of everyone in public health. Doctors, nurses, diagnosticians, technicians, pharmacists ... There is only a queue. And here let's look at the other side of the coin, because, as you know, a stick always has two ends. The adaptive paradox says that if we feel that it is impossible to change something here and now, we try to embrace it in our mini-world. It is only when the adaptation is no longer effective that we begin to make great changes - like the rebellion of the Gdańsk Shipyard workers after another price increase. Only the patient will not go out on the street. People don't get sick at the same time, and the sick person doesn't protest. We are already used to the protests of medics. A bit of eyeballing, stuffing, some slight increase for someone, then the medics quarrel internally and the caravan goes on.

So the doctors are screwing up how bad it is, the patients will get piss in the emergency room. And at the end of the day everyone is looking for a better world in "private life". This is dentistry. Have any of you visited a dentist at the NHF? Exactly ... Desperate patient is transferred to the private system, and the National Health Fund has it overcome.

Before our eyes, public health care, as we knew it, is dying, and the budget reflects the New Year's Eve champagne, because why stop a process that will solve many financial problems, and it has been known for years that in big politics one death is a tragedy, but 100,000 redundant deaths are just statistics.