Friday 29th of March 2024, 08:07 CET
How Crimea's NHS compares with Britain
June 11, 2002
Times Online

Written by Clem Cecil
Posted by HW on March 29, 2024

IT MUST have been the best view on the Crimean coast. Every morning I watched the sun rise over Yalta Bay, and the Black Sea pale from dawn’s fiery red to the shimmering silver of noon. I had no desire to leave — even though the view was not from a hotel but from a dilapidated Ukrainian hospital.
A few days earlier I was taken to the operating theatre of the Livadia hospital outside Yalta with a sharp pain in my side. I had been struck by appendicitis in one of Europe’s most backward countries. So much for my seaside holiday.

Livadia is where the Yalta conference of 1945, when Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt carved up the postwar world, was held. I was carved up beneath rusty hospital lamps, and awoke alone in Ward 11 with a rolled-up bloodstained mattress as a pillow.

A nurse with peroxide hair, impossibly long nails and bright red lipstick was soon plunging the first of many injections into my backside. “It’s all right, my little hare,” she cooed, and handed me a list of the medicines I needed.

A chemist at the hospital entrance sold supplies to a queue of hobbling invalids or their relations. Patients with no money fell on the hospital’s mercy.

As in Britain, the Ukrainian health service is supposedly free, but for years after the Soviet Union’s collapse the Government did not pay hospital staff, so patients are charged for treatment. Wages have resumed, but are still pitifully low — £10 a month for nurses and £25 for doctors — and the hospital has a tiny budget and little modern equipment. I paid £200 for the operation; that included the best room in the hospital.

The “de luxe ward” boasted an en suite bathroom, a verandah, a television which toppled over and smashed when I tried to turn it on, and a bed which inclined and reclined at the touch of a button. It wasn’t exactly Bupa, but the view of Yalta Bay made up for the shabbiness. Doctors told me that Raisa Gorbachev was treated in the same room after a curtain rail fell on her head in the former President’s nearby villa. The average Ukrainian cannot afford such luxury. Wards held six beds and lavatories and showers were communal and filthy. No toilet roll or soap was provided.

Food also was not provided. I was lucky and the kind local interpreter, who had persuaded me to go to hospital in the first place, brought me chicken broth and mashed potato in jam jars, for which I will be eternally grateful. Others were tended by their relations and friends. Those with nobody begged from visitors or occasionally received food from a local Baptist mission.

Unlike NHS hospitals, there was no television or radio to distract patients. Instead, they gathered on the wide hospital balconies and, holding a drip in one hand and a fag in the other, swapped symptoms and chatted up nurses whose cigarette ends were stained red with lipstick. A tobacco stall by the hospital entrance provided for a need that seemed to be as vital as medicine.

Animals were another distraction. A grey tomcat prowled our floor and was fed titbits. Stray mongrels nuzzled patients sunning themselves in the yard and goats munched the wild grass, bells tinkling at their necks. The goatherd picked bags of green wheat that grew in the hospital grounds to brew home-made vodka. “You are not better until you’ve had your first vodka,” said Natasha, a nurse with piled up blonde hair and dimples, who liked to advertise the benefits of marriage.

“Twenty six and single? I’m on my third husband and I’m not yet 30,” she would say to distract me from injections.

In London, I went to my doctor. “It couldn’t have been done better here,” he said.
 
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