This
observer recently had the opportunity to
visit with administrators and medical staff at some of Syria's largest
state-run Ministry of Health hospitals (Syria also has Higher Education Hospitals for
university students and Ministry of Defense Hospitals, the latter being roughly
equivalent to American Veterans Hospitals for the military,) which is Damascus General Hospital, established in 1952.
Damascus Hospital sees approximately 800 patients daily and is one of 90 hospitals
belonging to the Ministry of Hearth that together serve all of Syria with 14,
571 beds. Medical care in Syria is virtually free. .
Emergency Department of Damascus Public Hosptial founded in 1953
Among
those I had the opportunity to meet with at Damascus Public Hospital and to
discuss issues raised by Amnesty International were Dr. Mahmoud Naji ( Email address removed )
who is the Director of the Emergency Department and Intensive Care Unit at
Damascus Hospital and Dr. Adib Mahmoud, ( Email address removed ),
Damascus Hospital administrator.
Both the Syria Medical Emergency Association, of which Dr.Naji is a representative and the Syrian Medical Association, have large memberships with the reputation of being fiercely independent of and resistant to outside influences. At the same time they have achieved individual treatment and medical ethics standards that help make Syria's medical services the highest rated in the Middle East.
Amnesty qualifies its findings with complaints that it did not have access to Syrian hospital staff, and that it wanted to protect its "witnesses" by withholding some specifics such as time, place, and circumstances of alleged wrongdoing by members the Syrian medical community, as well as the unwillingness of alleged victims of abuse to come forward. For their part, Syrian medical staff complained to this observer that AI's Report is deeply flawed and that in fact Syrian hospitals welcome foreign visitors for tours and dialogue with all questions honestly addressed. Syria's medical profession has justifiably taken umbrage at what it considers, as one Physician described, "Amnesty International's "gratuitous defamation of Syria's medical community."
According to Amnesty's report, but without providing convincing collaborative evidence, wounded patients in at least four government-run hospitals had been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, both by medical workers and security personnel.
AI's charges that Syrian medical staff humiliate or refuse to treat patients brought laughter from some care givers at Damascus Hospital, as they explained the strict procedure they abide by from the moment a patient arrives at the emergency entrance. "We treat each patient to the best of our ability and we are strictly forbidden from questioning them about the circumstances of their injury," Dr. Mahmoud Naji explained.
This observer was invited to literally follow arriving emergency room patients as they were admitted and treated and until they were assigned a bed in the appropriate ward.
A nurse, who was filling out a patient's medical forms noted, "In certain cases if there was an auto accident, for example, and an injured person arrives while the accident is being investigated then we could contact authorities. "However, our patient privacy rules are very strict in Syria and we can only ask medical and certainly not political questions, "according to one ER intern as she took the blood pressure of an arriving young woman who complained of stomach cramps.
A Physician who had trained at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston explained, " I am sure there must be some abuse and especially in the middle of an area where there is fighting, but I have personally never heard of any physician or medical personnel doing what some Western media have alleged without submitting proof. Do police officers sometimes come to the hospital? Yes but it's like what you would see, for example, in America on a week-end night at the emergency room in maybe the 200 largest cities., isn't it? When I was training in Boston and with all that goes on in the early hours of the morning in big cities, one sees more police cars outside emergency rooms than ambulances. While it's not like that here, the police presumably sometimes have reason to suspect that a crime may have been committed and the arriving injured person might be the victim or the perpetrator and an officer has the duty to complete a police report. I believe it's similar anywhere."
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