“Medicine became distinguished when specialised knowledge was used for the benefit of the patient. It became noble when the needs of the patient held sway over the interests of the practitioner” — Rosenberg, 1987

IN Pakistan, discussions about healthcare usually revolve around the number of hospitals, doctors, hospital beds, ventilators, medicines, and health budget. This is important, but there is another crisis that is harder to measure and frequently ignored: the gradual loss of humanity from medicine.

To humanise medicine is not merely to ask doctors to be kinder or improve their bedside manner. It is to recognise that healthcare is, at its core, a relationship between human beings. A sick person is not a diagnosis, a bed number, a laboratory report or a source of revenue. Nor is illness simply a technical problem to be fixed with increasingly sophisticated machines and medicines. People become ill within families, communities and societies. They bring to hospitals not only symptoms, but fear, poverty, uncertainty, grief and hope.

Pakistan’s fragmented health system makes this human connection particularly difficult. At one end are government-run facilities, which are overwhelmed, understaffed and under-resourced. At another, there is the fee-for-service private sector, where access depends on one’s ability to pay. In between are charitable hospitals, which provide an invaluable service but cannot compensate for the failures of the national system. The result is that healthcare in Pakistan is a lottery in which the patient’s income determines not only where they receive treatment, but how quickly and with what degree of dignity.

A hospital may possess the........

© Dawn