Weren’t You Going to Entrust Me to Turkish Physicians?

The hatred and stress building up in society are exploding one way or another. And it looks set to explode even more. One professional group getting its share of this picture is doctors. According to statistics, about nine thousand doctors have recently resigned to work in private hospitals. One thousand four hundred have chosen to try their luck abroad. Hundreds more are in line.

Among the reasons for the resignations are long working hours and violence by patients’ relatives. Last year alone, thirteen thousand health workers filed complaints because they had been subjected to violence. Add to this the fall in salaries, and who can keep Turkish physicians?

The measure the government has taken against this problem is of a kind that will cure nothing: employing foreign doctors to cheapen physicians’ labour. According to Ministry of Health data, seven out of every ten doctors who signed contracts in family medicine last year were foreign nationals, and these doctors are paid less than permanent staff doctors.

A few days ago, New York Times writer Carlotta Gall drew attention in her column to the situation of doctors in Turkey and the brain drain (brain drain). The incidents she described are the kind that make one say “How can this be?” A young doctor killed in a traffic accident after long hours and a shift, another doctor stabbed in the stomach and hand by a patient’s relative, and a young nurse kicked in the stomach are just a few of the striking examples.

According to the British journalist, the health transformation programme Erdoğan launched with great hopes and the impasse physicians have fallen into unfortunately contradict each other. The hidden culprit of the violence is the “performance system” the government never tires of praising. Doctors, asked to see as many patients as possible in a day, have to complete examinations quickly. The public, seeing that it has access to every hospital, is at first pleased, but examination times that fall to as little as five minutes and doctors’ inability to give their patients enough time cause tension, especially among patients’ relatives.

A not insignificant proportion of the doctors who have gone abroad in recent years are physicians over forty. One of the reasons they give, in addition to their careers, is their children’s future. Although they have practised medicine for years, sadly they cannot look to tomorrow with hope.

Recently Deutsche Welle (DW) highlighted the decision of the Directorate of Public Hospital Services that physicians’ daily patient numbers be planned at seventy-two. The Turkish Medical Association’s (TTB) comment on this instruction was: “Treatment cannot be done by command.”

According to research, the number of patients a doctor sees in a week in Germany equals the daily number of patients of a doctor in Turkey. What one doctor told DW is like a tragicomic joke. When his German colleagues asked, “How many patients did you examine a day in Turkey?”, the young doctor answered, “Sometimes it reached five hundred.” Hearing this, the Germans snapped at the young doctor, whose German was not very good: “You must be confusing five hundred with fifty!” Unfortunately there was no error in the young physician’s count. This anecdote is a short summary of Turkey’s health system, of what physicians go through and of the reasons for the brain drain.

According to a Human Rights Watch report, doctors who think differently from the government face serious accusations, from creating anxiety, fear and panic among the public to making propaganda for a terrorist organisation.

While the debate continues over whether Atatürk really said “Entrust me to Turkish physicians”, the question of whether we will really find physicians to entrust our health to in the future does come to mind.