By By JOY ARPIN, M.D., Naples and Edinburgh, Scotland
Saturday, March 29, 2008
My husband’s life was saved by the cardiac team at NCH’s Downtown Naples Hospital.
Within two to three minutes of his walking into the emergency room, he had an EKG which diagnosed a massive heart attack. Treatment was initiated and within 30 minutes of his arrival he was in the cardiac angiography suite where an emergency angioplasty and stent insertion was done.
His previously asymptomatic extensive coronary artery occlusions required a quadruple-bypass procedure three days later when his condition stabilized.
The efficiency and competence of the NCH team is remarkable. And anyone who had arrived at the ER with similar symptoms would have been treated as expeditiously! This is the best health care in the world and the cardiac care at NCH is amongst the very best at any hospital in the United States.
Our summer home is in the United Kingdom, where the National Health Service’s failings are a constant topic in the news media. There are incredibly long wait lists to have an MRI or other investigative procedure, for referral to see a specialist for cancer or coronary care, or to have elective procedures (joint replacement, for example).
The care is rationed and anyone who can afford to doesn’t use it.
The government is always setting new “target times” for access to a specialist or for surgery. They talk in terms of months, not days.
There is a thriving private health-care sector and many of the affluent come to the U.S. for care. Even middle-class people elect to go to clinics in India for joint-replacement surgery rather than wait the 18 months or so in the NHS for treatment.
We very much enjoy our summers in the U.K., but I have no doubt that had my husband suffered the same event as occurred last week, he would not have had access to the remarkably high quality and rapid care that saved his life here in Naples.
While our experience is anecdotal, the statistics and data confirming the failings of government-run health-care systems in the U.K., Canada and elsewhere are readily available.
Our medical-insurance system may not be perfect, but to use the British or Canadian systems as models to improve ours is ridiculous.
I hope the public and the politicians look at the facts before we dismantle what we now enjoy.
“Change’’ is not always improvement.
Dr. Arpin is a retired surgeon.