There is a recurrent scenario that serves as the culprit as to why Nigerians don’t fancy our healthcare system. If you were to ask a Nigerian why they hate hospitals, or even why they hate nurses, they would recount this same story to you.
They’ll tell you how they had to rush a loved one to the hospital one day, and when they got there, before the healthcare professionals agreed to attend to a visibly dying person, they asked them to buy a card.
Now, this is an obviously frustrating occurrence. The fact that a human being would see another dying and refuse to help them if they didn’t pay a stipulated amount of money is crazy at first glance.
As a healthcare worker, when this matter is brought to my table, I usually tend to bite my tongue and just give them the opportunity to vent, because more times than not, the dying person actually ends up dying. You can’t argue with someone that’s telling you they lost a relative or a friend.
Should hospitals focus more on ethical care or financial gain?
Hospitals are quite different from other types of businesses. In cases where businesses sell products, a hospital sells the health of individuals. They deal with saving lives, and that is the commodity being sold—saving lives.
While it is important to save lives, it is also necessary not to forget that hospitals are a place of business. The management team is obligated to provide materials needed to work; they are required to pay the salaries of all the members of staff, utility bills, and even bills from lawsuits. Heck, they also have to go home at the end of the month with money in their pockets.
It is therefore paramount that some form of balance be struck between ethics and profit. Let us take a closer look.
Ethics, in the context of hospitals, involves providing a level of care to patients that encompasses upholding patient dignity and confidentiality, seeking informed consent from the patients before carrying out any procedure on them, giving fair and equal access to care, and so on.
Using the aforementioned case as an example, the ethical and ideal thing to do would be to save the life of a dying person and make sure that they are stable, at the very least, before demanding remuneration for services rendered.
An ethics-driven hospital tends to produce better patient outcomes, build trust among clients, maintain employee morale, and have a remarkable reputation in the world.
A profit, on the other hand, is pretty self-explanatory.
There are numerous occasions where we are faced with choosing one or the other. In cases where patient treatment is delayed due to problems with their insurance company, or when the hospital provides cheaper and substandard medications for patients over effective but costly ones, or even overworks the nurses instead of hiring new nurses to reduce the workload.
This goes to show that everyone, including patients and staff, is usually affected negatively.
Despite all of this, I believe that there are effective ways to strike a healthy balance between the two.
Using feedback from frontline staff about operational changes.
Whether it is a more effective way to schedule work among the staff in order to tackle burnout or a particular procedure that patients tend to shy away from, leading to less client traffic, it is important that the staff member be included in the decision-making process.
Transparent Pricing
A published list of pricing for various services being rendered in a facility will go a long way in giving patients the opportunity to have control and insight over their financial investments into the hospital.
It is also going to help foster trust among clients.
All images used are mine...