Differences in health care

Many people, and I’m sure we have also at times, complain about our health care system here in Australia. Amy recently made a fantastic blog about her experiences in Cambodia. I too shared these experiences and am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to, and encourage anyone to go to another country less fortunate than ours. I could talk for hours about all the amazing things that myself and the other students that went saw while we were there, but I will just describe one particular experience that really stood out to me.

I spent two and a half weeks at a place called Kien Khleang National Rehabilitation Centre, specifically at the Children’s Surgical Centre. Check out their website at www.csc.org , it really is a remarkable place. They truly do amazing things for the Khmer people.

Some background information on the place;
- it’s a small facility located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh
- Kien Khleang has several small facilities
- Veterans International (a rehab centre)
- Children’s Surgical Centre
- A leprosy clinic
- the CSC basically performs consultations, surgery, and some ongoing treatment free of charge for any local Khmers. Just check out the website to save time me explaining.

There is only one physiotherapist who works there so he is pretty busy, especially considering he deals with some pretty interesting post-op patients. He speaks fairly good English, as do most of Khmer staff working there, although nearly all the patients do not.

While I was there I treated a young girl who was roughly 9 years old. She had had a quadriceplasty on her left leg. That was pretty interesting, but not the most interesting thing about her. Her right leg had a subluxed patella. I have no idea how long this had been for, but judging by the muscle shortening and movement patterns that she had adopted, we assumed it had been like this for a reasonable length of time. I was curious why the surgeons had done nothing to address this. Ath (pronounced Art), the physio at the centre, told me that the priority was surgical intervention for her quadricep contracture and that maybe in a few months when she returns (if she returns) for a follow-up assessment, the surgeons may consider to relocate her patella.

This was somewhat of a shock to see. I saw some amazing injuries and surgeries while I was there that simply would not occur in Australia. This situation just would not occur here in Australia. If someone presented to a clinic with a subluxed patella, they would most likely be either sedated or given pain relief and have the patella relocated. In Australia it would be absurd to let a patient walk around with a subluxed patella for months or even years. But the Cambodian people simply deal with it. And its not just subluxed patellas either, they will not receive treatment for fractures, tumors, and many others. This is for many reasons, such as lack of money, transport, facilities, qualified medical staff and many more. But the point is that they have it pretty hard, as do many other third world countries, yet they live through adversity and do not complain about it. Which leads me to my main point.

Here in Australia we serious take an awful lot of things for granted. For one, our health care system. It would have to be up there as one of the better health care systems in the world, yet we constantly complain about it. Of course there are many things that we could do to improve it, but really is that the point. Since my experiences in Cambodia, when I hear people complain over insignificant petty things regarding our health care system I think to myself just shut up and look at some other peoples situations and be thankful that you have what you have got, because it really isn’t that bad.

This situation, along with many other experiences in Cambodia has really helped me put things into perspective regarding our and other health care systems. It may make me more frustrated with some of the whinging patients I may encounter, but at least when I think I have it tough I can think back to some people I got to see who had it really tough, and not complain about my situation. I hope others reading can gain this message and think about it when they approach similar situations in the future.