The long and wide corridor in one of Zagreb's largest hospitals - with a mass of counters in a row, behind which branches of specialist clinics and day hospitals branch out - reminded me of the airport area and its exit points. And of course, as in the airport, a mass of people, a lot of people, the vast majority of whom are quietly immersed in their own mental-virtual bubble. This bubble is filled with concern for their own health or the health of someone close to them, because no one is there just because they feel like hanging out in the hospital. I don't know of any such cases.
It is a specific scene of a citizen-patient, while in the hospital waiting room, quietly and thoughtfully contemplating, isolated in his own capsule, and yet squeezed in a mass of others. Alone with others. Many of us are familiar with that characteristic, slightly tense silence, caused by exhaustion due to the often long, several-hour waits for a doctor to see us. And then at some point, something and/or someone interrupts that silent mass, the arrival of an ambulance and the bringing in of a patient on a mobile bed, for example. Or, simply, the outburst of a citizen-patient who has accumulated reasons for dissatisfaction, snapped, decided to deliver them angrily and loudly. And to whom else but the nurse he intercepted in the hallway, or the worker at the counter who has already told him five times clearly and kindly that he must be patient. He will be served, he just has to wait a little longer.
These are well-known, classic scenes of micro-social antagonisms in a bulky institutional-organizational structure that has been slowly but systematically collapsing for a long time, for decades. These tenacious fragments of the printing press model of public health care, one of the greatest stories and one of the most important achievements of modernization here. I guess everything that needs to be said has been said about the systematic and interest-driven collapse of our public health care model. Thousands of journalistic-investigative pages have been written and hours of recorded material have been recorded that help us in the difficult task of breaking through this dense octopus of corrupt-clientelistic practices in conjunction with business and political actors, mafia-like favoritism to the interests of private medical lobbies and pharmacists, so that we can only guess at the extent of the robbery of all robberies in the (post)transition.
And what or who still somehow holds the aforementioned fragments of such a collapsing model together, in what kind of whole? Nothing and no one but people from the same system, most often those lower in the structure, with whom the citizen-patient has the most contact. Their dedication and perseverance are what still keep the collapsing system's nose above the surface of the mud it is sinking into. It is late, Friday evening, when I write these lines, and we are already slowly sliding towards Saturday, when I hear a notification that I have received an e-mail. It is my family doctor telling me that she has just put the referral I need into the system.
Bonus video:
