There’s a thing called the Hippocratic oath, taken by medical students when they end their studies and set out on their careers. It’s 2,500 years old now, so it’s a bit out of date. For one thing, the medic declares, “I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygieia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses” to keep the oath; for another, aspiring doctors say, “In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.” Mind you, leaving aside the divine law, the purity promise may be less out of date when coupled with the promise to avoid “any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.” (We may once have thought slavery was out of date after Toussaint L’Ouverture and Wilberforce, but not any more.) It may also be encouraging to know that your GP has sworn, “I will not use the knife, even upon those suffering from stones, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.” But much is out of date – the prohibition of abortion for example. But there is one promise that’s right up to date, even to today’s headlines, and it’s one we all need to be sure of. Speaking of their patients, doctors promise: “I will do no harm or injustice to them.”
Both those things were done to Esayas Welday, an Eritrean asylum seeker in the UK. He was diagnosed with leukaemia and started a course of chemotherapy. But suddenly the treatment was stopped and he was told that, because he couldn’t afford the £33,000 needed to pay for the treatment, that was it. He had already been homeless. Now he was homeless again, turfed out of Northwick Park Hospital in West London, with a few bits of medication in a plastic bag. Read his story below. The hospital trust apparently treated him in this way because they thought the government had instructed them to do so. They said: “Mr Welday is not eligible for NHS treatment … he is homeless with refugee status.” They were wrong. He was eligible although he was homeless. They were wrong again because with refugee status he would have been eligible. They were wrong yet again because he didn’t have refugee status, he was simply an asylum seeker asking for refugee status. And as such he was eligible because his treatment was urgent. How did they get all this wrong? I would guess it’s because these particular rules, part of the government’s hostile environment towards migrants since 2017, are complicated, strict and presented in such a way that the pressure is on staff to err on the side of refusal rather than follow their instinct to care.
Happily, another hospital interpreted the rules in a different way. Whittington Hospital in North London looked at their patient, looked at the rules, and refused to be panicked or pressured into doing “harm or injustice” to him. His treatment continued.
My point is this: capitalism corrupts everything, It has no respect for human decency. It even tricks people sworn to a duty of care into thinking that they now have no need to care. It demands what this article describes as payment “upfront for many forms of hospital-based medical care, even though such patients are usually penniless and often destitute, like Welday.” Complicated and hard-to-interpret government rules imposing a hostile environment seemed to lock the NHS bureaucracy and then its staff into a scenario that would have ended in Esayas’s death (at 29) if another solution had not been found by other staff.
We definitely need a general election. But we need more than that. We need to overturn a system of markets and money and profits and a culture of xenophobia and racism that insists that “they” are not equal to “us”. Are our alternative leaders up to the job? I hope so. But I don’t know.
The article:
Bob Mouncer's blog 