IRAQ: Looking After Pockets, Not Patients

[nosmokes]

The Iraqis were certainly a quick study when it came to American style healthcare. If you can pay it's no problem. Is it any wonder we're so loved?
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original-ips

IRAQ: Looking After Pockets, Not Patients

By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail*

BAQUBA, Dec 15 (IPS) - A nurse at Baquba General Hospital asked Ahmed Ali, who co-authored this report, for a bribe to look after his sick baby. It was hardly an exceptional demand. Patients around Iraq have begun commonly to speak of the need to bribe medical staff to get some form of care.

"Nurses in Iraqi hospitals are no angels of mercy," Falah Najim, who was a patient at the main hospital in Baquba told IPS. "They look after their pockets, not the patient."

The practice of bribing medical staff has been around since at least the 1990s, during the difficult days of the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War. After the U.S. invasion of 2003, this seems to have become worse, like so much else in Iraq.

"The profession of medicine has changed from a profession of mercy to just money making," Abdullah Najeeb, a trader in Baquba city, about 40km north-east of Baghdad, told IPS.

Staff shortage has clearly made the problem worse. More than half of about 36,000 medical workers who were in the country at the time the U.S. invasion, including doctors, nurses and other staff, have fled the country. "It is very hard to see a doctor in a hospital or in a clinic," hospital employee Sabay Ismail told IPS.

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complete article here