North Korean authorities are incurring local resentment after the provincial hospital in North Hamgyong Province killed a stroke patient through negligent care.
A source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Friday that a patient who was rushed to the provincial hospital of North Hamgyong Province after a stroke on Aug. 7 died when hospital staff left him to die, performing only basic tests without treating him. This is incurring local resentment and discontent.
According to the source, the provincial hospital of North Hamgyong Province has been unable to fulfill its mission as a hospital due to difficulties in maintaining its facilities, faced with general economic difficulties resulting from COVID-19.
On Aug. 7, a man in his 40s in the city of Kimchaek collapsed at his home due to a stroke. His family asked the provincial hospital to send an ambulance, but they were told the ambulances had no gas. So the family enlisted the help of relatives to bring the man to the hospital on their own.
However, after performing only basic procedures such as a blood test, the hospital judged it could not treat him under the current circumstances. The doctors left the room, leaving only the man’s wife and mother by his side.
The patient’s wife and mother waited, believing the doctors had left to confer over treatment. But when the doctors’ absence continued despite the urgency of the situation, they searched out the doctors and the head of the hospital’s technical staff, begging them to save the man.
With time passing, the patient received no treatment at all. In the end, he died less than 24 hours later.
The source said the bereaved family members wailed in protest, accusing the hospital staff of “cruelly killing” the man even after all the difficulties the family went through getting him to the hospital to save him. However, the hospital said it could do little else in the circumstances.
In fact, the hospital reportedly said it was not receiving electricity, had no oil for its generators and was suffering woeful shortages of medicines and medical equipment, and so was in no condition to perform operations.
Most locals who heard about this expressed resentment about the hospital’s treatment of the man, saying that if the patient “had been a cadre or the child of a cadre, the hospital would have figured out a way to turn on the generators and gather together the equipment to save him.”
The source said locals are unanimously slamming the state of provincial healthcare, claiming that outside of Pyongyang, the healthcare system is falling apart and hospitals are becoming “places that kill people rather than save them.”
