WHG baddie@isa2001m
Experience using a Brazilian public hospital today: not bad at all.
I had a minor health issue I wanted to get checked out. In Brazil, you have the option of going to a private or public hospital. Since it was something small, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to check out the public hospital, and if it was really bad I could always go to a private one afterward.
My husband came along with me to the closest hospital to where we live. They took my information, asked why I was there, and put me in a waiting room. A nurse called me in, then referred me to a doctor. The doctor said I needed to go to a different (public) hospital because they didn’t have the specialized department I needed at the hospital we were at. At that point we had spent maybe 25 minutes there, so it was all very quick.
We got into an Uber. At the new hospital we went directly to the right ward. There, an administrative employee started taking my information, and it all became very funny. She asked me where I was from. I said “Holanda,” and she was like ??? My husband started explaining in Portuguese: she’s Dutch, she’s from “Holanda, Países Baixos.” The woman started laughing and said she’d never heard of it before, and then we started laughing too because she was typing “Onlanda” into the computer. Imagine meeting someone from a country you’ve never heard of before. It is indeed kind of funny. She was very nice.
Anyway, after that we waited in another room for maybe 10 minutes. A new male nurse started taking some medical information and checked my blood pressure, etc. He was the only male staff member we interacted with; everyone else was female.
We waited another 15 minutes. Then finally we went into a room where a very sweet nurse and doctor helped me. They did some tests and gave me a prescription. The mulatta nurse spoke English quite well. No one else did, which was fine — I understand a little bit of Portuguese and my husband speaks it fluently, and no one seemed bothered by me not speaking it well. The doctor also asked me out of curiosity: what language do they speak in the Netherlands?
So overall, a good experience with kind people, not much waiting, and it was all free.
The only downside: the public hospitals are quite run-down. Some broken waiting room benches. Walls that haven’t been painted in years. Visibly old machines. For serious issues I would go to a private hospital.
But honestly, all of this in a private hospital probably would’ve taken the same amount of time, they would’ve prescribed me the same medicine, and the tests they did would have cost somewhere between €150–300.
