The Irish Health System (yes that again!) is ridiculous!
Oh wait, I've said that before, haven't I? Bear with me.
One of my sister's carers brought her baby to the emergency room two nights ago, with a rash and itching which the doctor she had called out originally confirmed was shingles. He said better get him to hospital, so she did.

After many hours' waiting, the doctor at the hospital refuted the other doctor's diagnosis, said it was chickenpox. She told him no, her child had already had that. He stuck to his guns. Or maybe it was a she, not sure, doesn't matter.

Prescribed Calpol (baby medicine) and Nurofen (painkiller). She went back to her own doctor, who flipped! That isn't chickenpox he fumed, and putting the child on Nurofen would only aggravate the symptoms and make him worse!

How can one doctor not accept the opinion of another, ignore the very obvious fact that you can't get chickenpox twice, and then prescribe something that could do the child harm? Where's the professionalism? Even if they're tired (which they frequently are) or inexperienced, can't they take the opinion of a doctor who's not rushing around a hospital trying to do ten things at once and say, oh well he must be right?

What's one incompetent doctor have to do with the entire Irish Health System?

That's what I was wondering too.

You know how TH is with "logic".

He (or she) is just one example, and endemic of a system that refuses to pay its indigenous qualified doctors and nurses enough that they won't seek employment outside the country, leading to the influx of foreign doctors (not saying this one was, I don't know and I have nothing against them) with the possible loss of the "chain of respect", shall we say, from doctor to doctor. If this were one isolated example, fine, but the amount of misdiagnoses, the apologies the HSE (Health Service Executive, who run the hospitals and the whole administrative arm of the health service) have had to make, the payouts, the court cases, all point to a system so badly broken that it will in all likelihood never be fixed, no matter how many people die.

There should be a culture, surely, of listening to and valuing the opinion of your colleagues rather than dismissing them out of hand? I know this is one case but as I say it's a symptom of a deep malaise affecting the entire health system. Doctors who are too tired, aren't properly trained or aren't fluent in the language, doctors and nurses who feel they have something to prove, and the patient coming a very low third or fourth on their priority list.

Of course, you don't get that if you go private! ;)
Currently, or at least yesterday, most of the major hospitals had upwards of thirty people on trolleys waiting to be seen in emergency wards. That can't be right, surely? And the health budget just keeps getting slashed? Now we have the case of a child who is dying of cancer and can't get a medical card? The parents have to prove she IS dying, and that they're not trying to scam the system?

I said it before: what a ****ing joke of a country!

I just got stung by a wasp for the first time ever, right on my middle finger. It was my own stupid fault for trying to smoosh it with a curtain instead of shooting it with an AK-47, but still... it hurts like hell.

:rofl:

Did ya get the stinger out? Wasp infections suck.

I used to work at a park, and one of my jobs was to pull out the brambles that grew along the paths in the campground. Once, I was yanking them out, when I accidentally opened up an underground nest of yellow jackets. They flew around me and landed on me, but didn't sting me, and I calmly walked over to the campground's store and shut the door. Right when I thought I had escaped them and lucked out, one of them flew through the window and stung me right on the eyelid. For a week or two, half of my face swelled up due to a reaction, and my eye got so bad that I had to wear an eyepatch. :(

Shiver me timbers, that sucks, matey.