The Nightly Grind: Ogden on Georgian Medics

OPED

My wife is a doctor, and a few times a week she has to work the night shift at her hospital. One would have thought that after six years in this country, I might have understood exactly what that entails, but my original suppositions were proved strikingly wrong.

An old girlfriend of mine works as a doctor in the UK and she too has to work the night shift. She arrives at work in the evening, works through the night, and then goes home in the morning. I imagine this is more or less the same drill in Europe and North America, but the practice does not extend to Georgia.

My wife goes to work in the morning at nine o'clock, and then works her regular working day; she is then expected to work all through the night, and then all through the next day. If she is lucky, she will have grabbed an hour of sleep, but she is not always so fortunate. The night shift in Georgia is simply working the night between your two working days.

As I have written elsewhere on these pages, I have the highest regard for Georgian medics, and would rather find myself under the care of a Georgian doctor than anybody employed by Britain's NHS. However, I would hesitate to trust the judgement of any physician who has not slept in 36 hours regardless of their country of origin or practice, especially if they work in a field such as cardiology.

I originally supposed that these appalling shifts were forced on her due to a lack of qualified doctors, but again I was proved completely wrong.

Many doctors in Georgia are female, but according to my wife (and others who work at other hospitals) their husbands forbid them from working the night shift.

I hesitate to discuss the issue of Georgian men and their values once again, but it seems to me bitterly ironic that men who openly boast about their reputation as the greatest lovers of the Soviet Union would secretly have such low confidence in their abilities that they cannot even trust their wives to work at night. As loathe as they are to let their women go out with friends at night, this kind of base male jealousy is not exclusive to Georgia – though admittedly nowhere near as widespread in other countries – but the idea that men actively forbid their wives from working at night surprised me.

This also leads on to the question of Georgian management. The fact that a woman's husband forbids her from working at night should not be an excuse for a female doctor (or anything else) from doing her job. Contracts have to be honored; if someone cannot honor the terms of their contract, they should lose their job. This is, after all, how the civilized world – which Georgia so desperately wants to become a part of – functions.

I understand the issue with it, of course. If bosses begin firing people for having difficult and secretly insecure husbands, they might soon have no employees left. I personally believe, however, that the threat – or perhaps one or two examples – ought to be enough to kick things into gear. I hope so, anyway.

As things stand, first and foremost the situation is not fair on doctors who are prepared to work (and whose husbands are prepared to let them work) these crippling night shifts, but this also creates a danger to patients who may find themselves being treated by people who have not slept in almost two days.

The West has been holding Georgia's hand in almost every professional sphere since 2003 (and whether Georgia deserves to be treated like Europe's drooling cousin is a debate for another time), but by and large the medical sector has not had the attention of other sectors such as the military, and it's my belief (and I could well be wrong) that it doesn't need it. At the risk of repeating myself, Georgian doctors are amongst the best I've encountered (and I've found myself damaged in some way in every country between Canada and Japan), but the best doctor in the world will not necessarily make the best manager or leader. Perhaps Europe should send more of its medical experts to Tbilisi to put the screws on Georgian medicine, so a handful of doctors don't have to do the work of fifty.

Tim Ogden

Cartoon: Brian Patrick Grady