| Big money is circulating there too The scandalous case of ambulance workers in the Polish city of Lodz, who entered into a conspiracy with funeral service companies, promises to be very lengthy. The connection between health workers and funeral homes, to which they supplied information about deceased patients for a substantial fee, turned out to be not only a regional phenomenon. Investigative measures are being carried out in almost all major cities in Poland. Hundreds of witnesses have already been interviewed, the first arrests of doctors and bribers from funeral services have been made. No one has yet been charged with premeditated murder, but there are suspicions of killing by pharmacological means. The prosecutor's office intends to analyze the causes of death of about five thousand people, for which the exhumation of buried patients from the Lodz ambulance is not excluded. “It’s difficult to talk about a crime here; we have to talk about degeneration, a departure from all principles of ethics and humanity,” was how President Aleksander Kwasniewski responded to the first signals about corrupt “men in white coats.” The Lodz District Medical Council issued a statement yesterday that doctors involved in the scandal, “regardless of other sanctions, including criminal ones, will be deprived of the right to practice their profession for life.”
With the first sprouts of capitalist relations, the market for funeral services in Poland passed into private hands. Funeral homes appeared like mushrooms after the rain, vying with each other to offer the highest possible farewells. There was a real struggle for access to the body of the deceased. It happened that hearses from several companies came for one newly deceased person and the deceased was transferred from coffin to coffin. Where market relations flourish, information becomes a commodity. It is no coincidence that former employees of medical institutions became co-owners of funeral homes, who in turn began to rent autopsy rooms. Therefore, for example, in Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Szczecin, Gdansk and other cities, funeral homes received two-thirds of notifications about the deceased from hospital staff where death certificates were issued. In Lodz, 66% of such certificates (they were called leather here) were issued by ambulance workers, who actually monopolized the trade in corpses.
It is estimated that the annual turnover of the funeral services market in Poland is half a billion dollars, for which 2,800 funeral homes have entered the fray. According to the careful calculations of Gazeta Wyborcza, a million dollars in cash went to the Ambulance every year. The cost of information varies, but the average is $200. An average funeral costs one and a half thousand, so a company that receives more than 100 thousand dollars a year net can easily allocate a couple of hundred for an information provider. In Lodz the price of “leather” reached $450.
The ambulance service has not previously enjoyed a good reputation in Poland and has more than once been the cause of lawsuits. Recent events have further undermined trust in health workers. Despite calls from the ministers of health and justice not to indiscriminately denigrate the entire medical staff, it comes to the point that ambulances are booed and stoned, and relatives do not allow the called teams to give medicine to loved ones. All this taken together causes a headache for the government, which forces them to speed up the preparation of many regulations regulating the work of Ambulance. Denis ZAYTSEV, Warsaw |
|
