For many years the health care system was accustomed to whitewashing investigations • It seems that the Corona did not change anything in this matter • Interpretation
Since the outbreak of the corona plague, there have been many discussions around the world about how the field of health and medicine (and life in general) is changing forever, and how it is necessary to re-learn to treat patients in the new world with such a deceptive, elusive and deadly epidemic.
Archive photo: Ministry of Health
However, it seems that on one issue the main heads of the Ministry of Health in Israel continue to operate as in a world without Corona, where they tried, and too many times managed to whitewash, obscure, dissolve, hide and evade serious investigations into the quality of medical care in Israel. In hospitals and health funds.
Needless to describe the centrality of the corona in the lives of all of us, the economic and social health terror it imposes on the entire world, and the public attention and media coverage directed almost exclusively at the plague.
Despite all this, the director general of the Ministry of Health, Prof. Hezi Levy, recently ordered the establishment of a committee to examine the quality of medical care for corona patients (an important and very positive step), but dared to state in the same breath, in a scandalous decision, all materials prepared for the tests. And the conclusions will be kept secret and secret from the public forever, and will even be completely kept secret from the approximately 30,000 corona patients who have so far been hospitalized in the country and their families.
Yesterday, one of the directors of the country's hospitals also explained that the decision on the secrecy of all the conclusions of the investigation was intended to allow the investigation at all, and that if the confidentiality of the hospitals in the country and the doctors' unions were not boycotted or actually torpedoed.
This explanation reflects the mood in large parts of the health system in the country, which for many years was used to whitewashing such investigations and now the Corona has not changed anything about it.
The Ministry of Health's attempt to hide the findings of the investigation from the public is in fact even more sophisticated, because it relies on the Patient Rights Act which indeed allows for the establishment of a "Control and Quality Committee" to improve medical care whose findings and conclusions will not be revealed to the public. On the explanation and legal structure that the Ministry of Health bothered to find for this decision - but how the ministry failed to understand that in this decision it humanly harms the tens of thousands of Corona patients and their families, whose legal and civil right to know how and what happened to the medical care they received in Corona wards. Health as a whole is in the worst health crisis of the last 100 years.
And how can one believe the Ministry of Health that it will not cover up the investigations it hides from us, when in early July and this week Israel Today exposed a series of shocking complaints raised by doctors, including the director of the intensive care unit and nine specialist doctors from the Corona Department at Wolfson Government Hospital In corona patients.
Doctors complained that Corona patients in critical condition died due to serious errors in the care of the respiratory patients and unforgivable neglect (all complaints were rejected and denied by Wolfson management).
And what has the Ministry of Health done so far in the face of unusual allegations made by brave doctors at the hospital for which the Ministry of Health itself is responsible?
Shamefully, the ministry's management consistently and stubbornly avoided responding, thus giving, once again, the feeling that the Corona is hurting many Israelis, but it has failed to break the rhetoric, evasion and indifference of top Ministry of Health officials.