In an editorial in today’s Svenska Dagblad (SVD) Roland Poirier Martinsson writes about the differences in hospital and healthcare between Sweden and USA. He rightly points out that the standard of the American system is extremely high in all areas and in pretty much every community. In Sweden we are learned that the horrible capitalist Mecca on the other side of the Atlantic have dying people everywhere because they don’t get help or get substandard help.
Being a Swede living abroad and have done so in a couple of countries and have traveling some on top of that, I can definitely state that hospitals and healthcare in Sweden are terrible. I don’t why my birth nation always are ranked so high when UN or other organizations rank these sorts of things, but maybe it’s the amount of spending?
There is two things in particular that others are better on than Sweden, even if you are in poorer countries like Turkey or Estonia, and those two are: First of all the speed of the process. You get help more or less on the spot even for minor problems. In Sweden you need to wait for hours or half a day if you have broken an arm. And the second thing is the more caring attitude. In Sweden doctors and nurses are highly professional and well educated, but they do their thing like robots and I have never even seen a smile on any occasion I been to a hospital. In other countries they “take care” of you in a more service minded way. And those who have been hurt or sick know that a smile and some comforting words go a long way. So for those of you that thinks it’s so great that Sweden spend more on healthcare than most other countries, get bent.
A good rule is to check out the facts before you claim something; Sweden do NOT spend "more" on healthcare than similar countries (eg France, Germany etc). Despite the belief of many Swedish healthcare is, in comparison, highly cost-effective (no private hospitals (private funding), low salaries for health professionals, maybe this is the reason for absent smiles?) BUT this has implications, of course on patients satisfaction with the service offered.
ReplyDelete....although it'd take some doing to get worse than the health "service" in the UK...
ReplyDeleteThe syntax of the title and first paragraph of this entry suggests it's the swedish education systems and not health care that are substandard.
ReplyDeleteThe Swedish education system may be substandard but it doesn´t change the fact that healthcare in Sweden is inefficient and over-budgeted. The problem is not the quality, it is the cost of it, and also the accessibility as the process is indeed painfully slow.
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