American students meet the Czech health minister amid a row over caged beds
It has not been an easy week for the Health Minister Jozef Kubinyi. Last week he found himself at the center of an international controversy over the use of caged beds in Czech psychiatric hospitals. Then on Wednesday, his decision to put an immediate stop to the use of the beds provoked official criticism from president Vaclav Klaus. Yesterday however, Dr. Kubinyi was getting a very different kind of attention from a delegation of American medical students studying in the Czech Republic. Joshua Keating went along.
"It is only a very small percentage of cases use this kind of beds. It means, I think that there will not be problems with patients because of caged beds. They are used in a minimum of cases. If some hospitals need the help of the Ministry of Health, I promise the directors that I will do the maximum to help them find new room for this type of patient or new staff."
But very different issues dominated yesterday's meeting. End-of-life care, preventative medicine, and the challenges and benefits of public medicine were the main topics of discussion. Kubinyi said he was pleased to be talking to young people for a change, rather than politicians and journalists and shared some of his own impressions from the time he spent in America.
The students were here as part of an international exchange program registered through St. George's Medical College in Grenada. Martin Stransky, a neurologist who works in both Prague and Yale University is the program's facilitator.
"It's the only program of its type that I know of, not only in the Czech Republic but in all of Europe, wherein this many students from a variety of medical schools visit at the same time and are introduced to clinical medicine, different healthcare models, as well as different models of thinking in medicine."
What do you think they gain from that?
"They come to understand that healthcare is a global issue. That different models exist and that people quite simply do things differently in other countries and it works there too."
Stransky feels that an understanding of medical practices in other countries can help American students become better doctors.
"Especially in the United States there is a tendency to be somewhat, not egocentric necessarily, but to think that things are fairly limited everywhere to the way that we do them in the states, when in fact the exact opposite is true. The United States, especially as far as healthcare is concerned is really the complete exception in the world rather than the rule."
Aside from the chance to explore a world of medicine without HMOs and Medicare, students said they gained from the chance to observe Czech doctors at work.
"The reason that we came to Prague is to get a feel for what an average day would be like for a doctor in a foreign country."
While the caged beds did not come up, students did have some criticisms for the minister about what they had seen.
"Less was spent on preventative care, like, you know, making sure that needles and glasses are put in the proper waste bins. Just small technical things like that which actually could make a difference. But other than that it's great, much better out here as far as the doctor-patient relationship goes."
