eid
on Random Uganda (Uganda), 01/Dec/2009 06:30, 34 days ago
November 27thToday is Eid (Eid al-Adha), a Muslim holy day celebrating the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim (Abraham?) to sacrifice his son… If you are one of the faithful, you are probably eating goat tonight. My understanding is that today you are supposed to sacrifice a chicken, or a goat, or, if you are wealthy, a cow or two. You are to share the meat with the poor. About 10% of Ugandans are Muslim. But Eid is still a recognized bank and government holiday. At the Kibuli Muslim hospital, where Jean a VSO midwife works, there was a skeleton staff of infidels working.Eid is not, however, a recognized IHK holiday, but the place is surprisingly vacant of staff all the same. Even our OPD and emergency areas are frighteningly empty (as I think I mentioned before… our clientele don’t like to waste their time off going to the doctor. Something to be said for that. I was thinking about scoring a 3 day weekend myself, but we had a training team meeting for the clinics this morning and Dr. Andrew, knowing I was already in for the meeting, asked me to cover for him.Andrew is not Muslim. But it is his wedding anniversary, so I said sure. Andrew is one of the three medical directors here. The first two function so ineffectively at their jobs, they had to appoint Andrew medical director as well…(I don’t have a degree in medical management or anything—as it turns out, neither does Ian, or his buddy Kevin, our new ‘CEO’—but something seems wrong with this management strategy) Part of Andrew’s job is to put out customer care fires as they blaze up around the hospital…Today’s customer care dilemma was an angry patient in pharmacy: A man suffering from diabetes who had just been told that his health insurance wasn’t going to pay for the insulin his doctor prescribed him. Hmmm. Probably my remark—that I’d be pretty pissed off, too, if I found out that my health plan didn’t cover the medicine that I needed to ward off premature heart disease, renal failure and blindness—did not help things much. And of course, his health coverage is us.With IAA, and our newly acquired Microcare (finally, an insurance company that tells you right up front exactly how much they care) insurance line, the International Medical group at IHK now has the biggest share of the health insurance market in Uganda. And unfortunately, the folks who sell our policies have taken a page out of the American Insurance industry playbook: Advertise the world, sell the moon, and then given them the 27 page booklet of fine-print exclusions. Things like insulin.Lorna, the customer care rep for the day, wanted to pin the problem on one of my doctors.‘She (the doctor) shouldn’t have prescribed insulin. She knows we don’t pay for insulin.’ I tried to explain the concepts of the physician as patient advocate and do no harm. But she wanted me to reprimand Dr. Emma and have her apologize to the patient. Let me think… No. I think Lorna will be happy when Dr. Andrew gets back on Monday.