Healthcare Systems

 Obviously there are going to be differences in the Greek healthcare system compared to the US. I have been working at a public hospital so I can only remark on my experiences there and not at the private hospitals. 

The internal medicine department are actually referred to pathologists while what we call pathologists in the US are known as anatomical pathologists. A little confusing for me at first, but I digress. The hospital is set up so that there are different wards and you essentially stay in your area. So if a patient is admitted for a GI issue, they go to the GI floor and they manage all of their care. Patients were admitted to our service if we didn't quite know what was going on yet, they had many co-morbidities, or just had a general issue. As I mentioned in another post, the conditions we treated were very similar to conditions I have dealt with in the US. The diagnosis process and the plans we came up with were things that I was familiar with. 

One thing that is different is the concept of privacy. Some rooms only had two patients in them, but others had eight patients. In the US, I feel like privacy is such a bigger concern and that there would be many complaints if someone had to share a room with seven other people. But when we would round, the family members would all step outside or into the hallway so I never felt like we were sharing personal information. 

I also have noticed that the residents actually do a lot of work that nurses would do in the US. They take blood samples, run ABGs, suction NG tubes, and give medications. They did say that there is a nursing shortage currently so that could be contributing to this. 

A shocking thing to me was the pay and hours required. My resident stated that she gets three euros an hour for a 24-hour shift. I could not believe it when she told me that. They also are required to be on call every 2-3 days. I'm sure the pay, hours, and responsibilities change depending on where you are and what specialty you are in, but I couldn't help but compare it to the US. I was making my rank list while here and in that process I was weighing how programs handled call. I ended up ranking one program lower because they had 2 weekend call shifts a month and I thought that was bad. Yet, that's nothing compared to this. It is interesting to see just what is considered normal in the different systems.

The medicine itself is very similar. We were talking about Duke's criteria for endocarditis, how to handle low hemoglobin, and diagnosing C. diff. These conversations and guidelines were the same as what I learned in the US. So the medicine itself is the same, but organization is different. 

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