Health in Ghiza strip

 “The wounded keep dying in front of your eyes but there’s nothing you can do, and I think that is a trauma I will carry with me for all my life,” Bassel Amr, a volunteer ICU physician told Middle East Eye. He called the aftermath of ground attacks ‘beyond worst case scenario’ as the situation on the ground in Gaza unfolds.

 

Gaza’s hospitals were already at full capacity, tending to patients, including those who were wounded, pregnant women, children, and newborn infants in the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes. Unfortunately, with the recent ground invasion, the situation has further deteriorated. In addition to the existing patients, healthcare personnel are now also confronted with trauma injuries resulting from ground attacks.

“The smell of blood and sand is everywhere,” Dr Mohammad Mattar, head of the radiology department at Al-Shifa Hospital which is Gaza Strip’s largest and as of now only operational medical complex since other places have run out of fuel told NPR.

“We are left in a situation where we have to make the difficult decision to risk the life of one patient to save the life of another,” Dr Amr said. He emphasized that the hospital is extremely overcrowded, with “no space to walk,” as thousands of civilians have sought shelter there due to the Israeli airstrikes. Similar to the situation at Al-Shifa, Al-Awda is grappling with insufficient capacity to handle casualties and is facing a critical shortage of medical supplies, especially after the ground invasion.

He added that Gaza is now suffering from a shortage of shrouds.“There is nothing worse than not finding enough shrouds to cover the martyrs, so you wrap them with garbage bags and old pieces of cloth,” he said.

“Now, with the ongoing siege and the fuel running out, a humanitarian catastrophe is imminent, and we will lose patients in our department and possibly thousands of patients in the entire hospital,” he added.

Previously, in a video released by DW Cut, doctors have pleaded several times that Gaza is about to experience a total collapse of the healthcare system due to supplies running out like sand in hand and the number of casualties increasing each day. 

medical

Study: Doctors Are Less Likely to Follow Medical Guidelines

It's a common gripe of doctors that patients don't do what they're told. A recent study, however, found that doctors are even worse at following their own guidelines than their patients.

Swedish scientists and Stanford fellows at the Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) found that doctors are less likely to follow medical guidelines than their patients.

The study, published in the medical journal American Economic Review, noted that doctors and their close relatives follow medical guidelines just over 50 percent of the time. In comparison, the average patient follows a doctor's instructions 54% of the time.

With already low compliance to medical guidelines, the researchers were very surprised by their findings.

“Doctors are the most informed patients. If medical recommendations are too complex, for example, or the patient-provider relationship is bad, this shouldn’t affect doctors themselves, so we would expect them to adhere at much higher rates. Instead, we find the opposite,” said co-author of the study, Petra Persson, the Swedish economist and Assistant Professor in Economics at Stanford University.

The researchers used millions of data points to reach their discovery. They looked at Swedish administrative data from 2005 to 2016 and how it related to 63 guidelines for prescription drugs.

In total, nearly 6 million people who fit at least one of the medication guidelines took part in the study. Of that group, about 150,000 were doctors or close relatives of doctors. By looking at how well prescription drug decisions fit these patients' medical situations, the researchers were able to learn more about what rules people followed.

The researchers then tried to find out why doctors follow fewer guidelines. They were able to rule out a few important hypotheses.

Though this is typically true in society at-large, when focusing on medical professionals, failure to follow medical guidelines has nothing to do with socioeconomic status.

“Access to doctors is associated with lower adherence despite, rather than because of, the high socioeconomic status,” said the researchers in the paper.

A patient's health doesn’t affect how well they follow medical guidelines.

A greater understanding of specific medications doesn’t necessarily affect a person’s desire to follow medical guidelines.

Co-author and health economist Maria Polyakova noted a shift in health care, from a “one-size-fits-all approach" toward a “precision medicine” model. With the newer model, treatments are more likely to be customized to each patient.

Polyakova said that because of this change, doctors and medical experts may choose to tailor treatment decisions for themselves more than they do with most patients.

"We find that patients who have access to medical expertise are, on average, less likely to follow medication guidelines," says the research paper.