Related videos:
A specialist at the Guillermo Domínguez López teaching hospital in Puerto Padre (Las Tunas) has decided to leave his position after the hospital's director, Franklin Ojeda Téllez, imposed a sanction on him for not prioritizing a friend and treating him the same as the other patients, according to sources close to the doctor who has requested to resign.
Fifteen days after the incident, no one from the hospital has contacted this specialist to understand why they are leaving a job that many Cuban doctors continue to pursue out of passion, despite the fact that their salaries are not enough to support themselves.
From the young specialist's circle, who had been connected to the hospital in Puerto Padre for four years, there is regret that this case, which they see as a clear example of abuse of power, will ruin the career of a professional who was trained with public funds for ten years (six years to become a general physician and four for the specialty) without anyone questioning what happened.
It all started about fifteen days ago when the doctor who had been on leave from the hospital received a call from the Internal Medicine on-call team to evaluate a patient with lymphangitis, a condition that is not treated as an emergency and for which there is a clear protocol at the hospital, specifying a timeframe of 24 to 48 hours to assess the patient.
However, this was no ordinary patient; he was a friend of the hospital director, Franklin Ojeda Téllez, and also a relative of a well-known official from the Communist Party of Las Tunas.
The patient arrived at the hospital around 2:00 PM, and the sanctioned specialist notified Internal Medicine that, since it was not an urgent case, he would attend to other priority cases and would review this person's situation the next morning, within the established timeframe. However, this decision did not sit well with the hospital director, who called him to his office the following day along with a nursing supervisor. Once there, the sanctioned doctor explained to the director that there are only two specialists at the center and that there are other urgent patients, emphasizing that this was not an emergency.
The director, without even greeting him, informed him that he had a report of misconduct that he had committed the day before. No matter how much the specialist explained that lymphangitis is not a medical emergency, the director would not relent. Finding himself without arguments because the hospital protocol is clear on this matter, he stated that since he was the director and it was he who had summoned him, that patient should have been attended to at that moment, and he was going to impose a disciplinary measure.
Tired of everything, the specialist, who had been at the hospital since the day before, since morning, without having lunch, and had just entered to perform surgery at 6:00 PM, informed him that it would be his last day of work. The director responded, "One less angiologist," despite the fact that the institution only has two specialists left, and now they will be down to one.
"It has been 15 days since that happened, and no one has bothered to ask why a doctor at the hospital resigned, despite a patient, who witnessed the incident, complaining about it to Patient Services," lament those close to the affected doctor.
To return to his work, the specialist only needs an apology from the director for what his surroundings perceive as an abuse of power. "We just learned that this patient, being a friend of the director and a relative of a Communist Party official, is enjoying privileges such as being administered ceftriaxone (Rocephin), the only treatment remaining in the hospital, despite the fact that there is another patient who needs it with greater priority."
This is neither the first nor the only case of Cuban doctors choosing to leave their profession. Last November, a young Cuban doctor, who had just graduated three years earlier, shared a heartfelt confession on social media: he left the profession he loves due to the degrading state of public health in Cuba.
Recently, a doctor from Santiago de Cuba, weary from witnessing the deaths of patients due to a lack of medications and supplies, and frustrated by the regime's inability to find effective solutions, compared the precarious state of the healthcare system—long portrayed as a hallmark of the government—to the death of the homeland.
Filed under:
