Recently, a picture of the hospital's annual meeting was circulated on the Internet, and the banner hanging in the photo read: "Tigers and tigers greet the New Year, the operating room is full of money!"
Image source: Network
Subsequently, this banner quickly became a hot topic in society. The "Dongguan Kanghua Hospital Service Number" issued a situation note in the early morning of January 27: the banner was hung by the nurse herself, the content was indeed inappropriate, and solemnly apologized to the society.
Why is the banner inappropriate?
From the perspective of text content, the expression "all money in the operating room" means "making money by performing more surgeries", but in the eyes of both doctors and patients, its meaning is completely different.
From the patient's point of view, the operating room represents more disease and pain, whether it is the patient himself or the patient's family, with resistance. At the same time, there are huge barriers between medical knowledge and industry knowledge on both sides, and patients expect to receive dignified and effective treatment, rather than being seen as a "profiteer on the operating table".
In the view of the doctor, making money through surgery is the income of one's own labor, favoring technical and intellectual fees, and the nature is no different from other technical work.
Similar incidents have occurred many times in recent years, and the People's Hospital of Wuchuan City, Guangdong Province, once hung a banner, "Warm congratulations to our hospital on the number of inpatients exceeded 40,000 in 2012" - causing netizens to scold the hospital doctors for their lust and morals.
In the final analysis, it is the different positions of the doctors and patients, resulting in opposite understanding angles, which makes the banner cause an uproar on the Internet.
However, judging from the scene of the annual meeting, such a banner hanging is still inappropriate.
The hospital's annual meeting is a semi-public event, and the banners hung out, unlike the private speech, represent the views of a group of people and the image of an entire hospital. In the process of dissemination, a short banner was magnified into the representative remarks of medical workers across the country.
Jokes between insiders are originally understandable in the department, but when discussed in an open voice and as a serious topic, it will seem inappropriate, and even invisibly exacerbate the misunderstanding and contradiction between doctors and patients.
Private hospitals = morally corrupt?
After the incident, the wind direction on the Internet showed a one-sided trend, and some commentators took private hospitals as the original sin, believing that "private hospitals are morally corrupt", "what private hospitals do is only to make money on patients", and "banners just tell the truth".
But such a preconceived notion is also inappropriate.
Guangdong Kanghua Medical Co., Ltd. operates Kanghua Hospital, a for-profit general hospital, and private hospitals are blameless for aiming at making profits, but the criteria for evaluating hospitals obviously cannot only start from the "nature of making profits".
According to the data of March 2020, during the epidemic period, obstetric outpatient clinics and inpatient departments received normal treatment, with a total of more than 2,000 pregnant women in outpatient clinics, more than 400 inpatient deliveries, and 137 surgeries.
Image source: Kanghua Hospital Service Number
If we add "social responsibility" to the dimension of evaluating hospitals, it is clear that many evaluations with the premise of "private hospitals" should be reshuffled:
On the one hand, private hospitals have their medical value and social value, and cannot be simply equated with "moral corruption"; on the other hand, because of the premise of private hospitals, they cannot be taken for granted that "lowering the bottom line" is not taken for granted.
It was time to apologize, but the posture was wrong
In the apology statement released by the "Kanghua Hospital Service Number" in the early morning, it was said that the banner was hung by the nurses themselves, the content was inappropriate, and the ideological and moral education of employees would be strengthened.
And this apology is not on the point.
First of all, from the formulation of the banner content to the hanging at the annual meeting site, from the annual meeting to the daily training of employees, there are many links to handle, and after causing social impact, it is natural that individual employees should not be responsible.
Another important point to pay attention to is that the hospital's perspective on social communication is obviously lacking.
From the perspective of hospitals and medical workers, there is no conflict between "treating patients and saving people" and "making money". After all, it is the disease itself that hurts the patient, not the doctor who treats the disease; the doctor's source of income is "curing the disease" rather than "creating the disease".
As long as the treatment is done properly, talking about "making money" should not be subject to moral shackles.
The atmosphere of "only talking about dedication, not talking about returns" is not conducive to mobilizing the enthusiasm of doctors at the moment when medical resources are scarce.
In this incident, the real mistake of the hospital is not that "the hospital wants to make money" or "the medical staff hangs banners", but that the hospital has never considered the role played by patients in the medical process, the patients' feelings in the face of banners, and the lack of awareness of communicating with the public.
What hurt the most from this "banner incident" is still the already fragile doctor-patient relationship, which cannot be compensated for by apologies. (Planner: Leu.)
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