It speaks volumes to the selfish attitudes that lie at the core of the nation. We are far from living in a society where the golden rule applies.
An assailant attacked a 35-year-old man just a few meters from the doorstep of the Healthy & Happy Ukraine clinic in central Kyiv. Eyewitnesses said he went untreated for up to 30 minutes before a doctor from the clinic finally came and offered help. Witnesses said it took three separate pleas by two bystanders and a police officer before someone decided to honor the 2,500-year-old Hippocratic Oath.
One wonders what kind of triage system the clinic has set up and under what kind of code of ethics it operates, if any, to prioritize medical situations. The big question is whether the victim would be alive if he had received prompter treatment. The clinic says it wouldn’t have mattered – the man was mortally wounded.
The Kyiv Post reported that the clinic’s receptionist, a trained medical worker, told an eyewitness that the clinic receives patients by appointments only and that all the doctors were too busy to help the wounded man. Borys Kogan, the clinic’s chief doctor, said the receptionist called the manager for instructions, as if she lacked the instinct of human compassion and sympathy for another human life.
The clinic said that the doctor on duty rushed to the victim 10 minutes after witnesses asked for help, but only after he had finished bandaging a patient. Kogan dismissively said that, given the severity of the man’s wounds, “he would’ve died anyway.”
We’ll never know if Kogan was right.
But the doctor’s attitude is deplorable. He should be reprimanded severely. According to eyewitnesses, the only thing that the doctor administered was cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Every person’s death is a tragedy that diminishes all of us. This case is especially so, because of the indifference of the living.
