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Tonight’s preview to the feature event.

2/26/2008

“Russian health-care system badly ailing
Graft is rife, staffing short in the nation’s poorly equipped hospitals,and it shows in death rates”

MALOYAROSLAVETS, Russia - Health care is supposed to be free in Russia, but Russians know that everyhospital has its under-the-table price list.
That’s why the family of Khazerya Ziyayetdinova, a 70-year-old womansuffering from severe bedsores, brought cash every time they visited her atHospital 67 in Moscow. To have Ziyayetdinova recover in a room instead of thehallway, relatives slipped an orderly $300. They paid nurses $20 to giveinjections, change bedpans and unclog catheters. Every chat withZiyayetdinova’s doctor cost $40.
“Our health-care system is still in the Middle Ages,” said Vera Pavlova,Ziyayetdinova’s daughter-in-law, sitting in her home in this small town 54miles southwest of Moscow. “There’s low professionalism, corruption – itmakes me very worried about finding myself in a situation where I might needmedical treatment.”
Russia is an unhealthy nation, and its health-care system is just as sick.Its hospitals are understaffed, poorly equipped and rife with corruption.
The biggest reason Russia’s population plummets at a rate of more than700,000 people each year is not that its birthrate is so low, but that itsdeath rate is so high. The average life expectancy for Russian men is 59. Inthe U.S. it’s 75; in Japan it’s 79.
Alcohol and smoking are major culprits. Both are linked to heart disease,and in Russia, the rate of men ages 30 to 59 dying from heart disease isfive times that of the United States, according to researchers at ColumbiaUniversity.
Prevention and better health care can help reverse that trend. The Russiangovernment is pumping $6.4 billion into revamping health care; much of thatmoney is paying for the construction of eight high-tech medical centers acrossthe country, new X-ray machines, electrocardiograms and ambulances athospitals, and raises for family doctors.
But doctors and nurses in the Russian Far East city of Amursk are stillwaiting for the overhaul to reach their hospital. In January 2007, thehospital ran out of syringes and asked patients to bring their own, said OlgaCherevko, a nurse at the hospital. Even something as fundamental as keepingpharmacies stocked can prove problematic for Russia’s beleaguered health-caresystem. A bureaucratic breakdown in late 2006 led to a severe shortage ingovernment-supplied prescription drugs.
Russians with enough money were able to buy medicine privately. Buthundreds of thousands of Russians with high blood pressure, diabetes, asthmaand other diseases had to do without the drugs for weeks.
Russian officials have promised that the errors that led to the drugshortage won’t happen again. They can’t be as reassuring when it comes tocorruption that demands bribes for everything from surgery to clean sheets.
Researchers at the Open Health Institute estimate that corruption siphonsoff as much as 35 percent of money spent on health care (this sentence aspublished has been corrected in this text). Low wages perpetuate the problem;yearly doctor salaries in Russia average $5,160 to $6,120. Nurses make anaverage of $2,760 to $3,780 annually.
Pavlova estimates that Ziyayetdinova’s family shelled out nearly $5,000 inbribes during the time Ziyayetdinova was hospitalized.
At a skin clinic in Moscow, nurses charged $20 each time they appliedointment to Ziyayetdinova’s bedsores. One of her sons began sweeping up herward during visits because a nurse said room cleanup was the responsibility ofpatients or their families – not hospital staff.
The money never really helped. Ziyayetdinova died. Doctors said she died ofa heart deficiency, but Pavlova and Ziyayetdinova’s sons are convinced theindifference and neglect Ziyayetdinova endured during her hospitalizationcontributed to her death.
“It was as if their goal wasn’t to save someone’s life,” Pavlova said, “asif they thought their role was to be a last stage before death. To be a placethat prepares a person to die.”

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2008/feb/26/news/chi-russia_side_tuesdayfeb26