THE CLINICAL JUSTICE SYSTEM If you think there is justice in the healthcare system, you better think again! Based on True Events

By Ned Abraham

Based on true events, this book is a biography of the injustice that is rife in healthcare systems through the eyes of two naïve young medical students who grow up in Australia to become two utopic surgeons. Refusing to be squashed under the thumb of those who run the mighty healthcare

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ned Abraham
• Release date: Feb 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9798986821726

Ned Abraham

Ned Abraham is a surgeon & a clinical academic. He graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine with Honours (Distinction). He studied "Evidence" & obtained the Degrees of a Master of Medicine in Biostatistics & PhD in Evidwnce-Based Surgery (Sydney). He is a Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of England & of Australasia. He has been an invited guest speaker at multiple international meetings. His published work about "Evidence" has been cited in the literature close to two thousand times. He was an A/Professor of Surgery at UNSW Australia for 17 years & a Captain in the Australian Army Reserve for 10 years. He served in war torn Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, & Solomon Islands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Abraham

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Prologue

The Criminal Justice System

The Shawshank Redemption could have just as well been based on a true story. Only God, the prisoners themselves and those who committed the crimes know who is innocent and who is not.

People laughingly say that In prison, everyone is innocent but what if some of those prisoners were truly innocent?

Andrew Mallard spent twelve years in a West Australian prison after he was wrongfully convicted of murdering Pamela Lawrence in Perth in 1994. His conviction was quashed by the High Court in 2005. He received $3.25 million in compensation. Did the money compensate him for the wrong conviction and the twelve years in gaol?

Most certainly not!

He left his home country and moved to the United States. In either case and in 2019, Andrew was hit by a car while crossing Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and he died at the scene.

How many prisoners serve sentences for crimes they never committed?

The other Andrew, Andy in The Shawshank Redemption would have never been able to prove his innocence, not during his life sentence without parole, and not ever. With the execution style murder of his only witness, the only way out for Andy was to escape the gaol and the country the way he did. The overwhelming majority of prisoners, innocent or not, never try to escape, let alone succeed… just a side point.

Most of us have watched an episode or two of one CSI series or another; Criminal Intent, Special Victims Unit, and the like. These TV series depict a Criminal Justice System where, in most cases, justice is done. On TV, the baddies are caught and convicted, and the innocent are set free. On TV, only rarely, is an innocent man sent to jail for a crime he did not commit, or a guilty woman set free despite having committed murder.

The presumption of innocence is one of the fundamental principles of the Criminal Justice System. The accused is innocent until proven guilty.

In the Criminal Justice System, the accused has well defined and clear-cut rights.

Furthermore, in the Criminal Justice System, the accused does not have to prove their innocence. It is up to the prosecution to prove the guilt and to do so beyond reasonable doubt.

Do any of these principles apply in the Clinical Justice System?

This book is an attempt to answer that question by telling the story of a young, and a not so young, surgeon as they navigate the underworld of the healthcare system.

On the other hand, and in the TV series referred to above, clear references are made to real life government departments such as the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. However, all events depicted in those TV series are pointedly declared as being fictitious. Disclaimers are read out loud, asserting that any resemblance to real people or real-life events is purely coincidental.

This book does not come with a disclaimer.

The book is based on multiple true stories and real-life events that were compiled and adapted for the purpose of authoring this book. Therefore, while you are reading this book, if you notice a resemblance to a real-life event, that resemblance is most likely not coincidental.

The book is a biography of the injustice that is rife in the healthcare system through the eyes and ears of two naïve medical students who grow up in Australia to become two utopic surgeons. They desperately try to maintain their integrity amongst the tyranny of the healthcare system. Whenever one of them fell, the other was there to help him back up. They took turns at stumbling and falling, not knowing whether they are being led into the heavenly joy of their surgical careers or into the rot of hell of the healthcare system.

As the clinical stories in this book were inspired by real life events and were modified for the purpose of writing the book, the names and often the gender of the individuals involved were changed and so were the dates, the towns, the states and, sometimes, the countries.

I implore you not to lose trust in healthcare systems all together, but to understand its huge imperfections. I am not sure how much of a therapeutic effect this book may or may not have on those who work in that sick system, but I sincerely hope that it will inspire healthcare workers to speak up and realise that they are not alone.

I hope that this book helps highlight the ironies of our profession. I hope it also helps the medical, nursing, and other healthcare practitioners find their voice and, you never know, it might also help us find ways to fix our broken system.

Finally, I hope that this book will also open the eyes of the reader to a world that many of us did not know existed.

This is the underbelly of the healthcare system.

The Beginnings

In the beginning, Charlie had a very promising future, or at least, those who knew him thought he did. Although his ATAR was not quite high enough to guarantee him direct entry into medical school in the state of Queensland, where he was born, he cruised through three years of Medical Science at the University of Perth. This qualified him for entry into one of the most reputable universities in the country, Sydney, and into one of its most sought-after courses, Port-graduate Medicine. This was well and truly before the days of UCAT and GAMSAT. If it were not, Charlie would have aced those tests anyway.

Although Charlie’s father, Szymon Wójcik was born in Poland and had a Polish name through and through, he was of German descent. The Germans formed an extremely small minority of the Polish population, perhaps around one per cent. In post-World War II Poland, the balance of power was well and truly tipped against the German ethnic minority group. There was clear discrimination with jobs and with promotions within those jobs. Worse still, there was targeted violence with arson, and kidnappings. Szymon’s parents escaped Poland and travelled by land across two continents. They sought refuge in Australia in 1948 when Szymon was six years of age.

Very sadly, Szymon’s mother Katarzyna died from undiagnosed polio shortly after arriving in Australia. It remains unclear how and why she caught polio as this was decades before the days of Mandatory Reporting, the Health Care Complaints Commission and the like. Szymon’s father Filip could never work out whether his late wife had been given the then newly available polio vaccine or not. If she had, well… it clearly did not work.

For many years, Filip blamed himself for Katarzyna’s death. Filip worked at the local bakery as he raised Szymon on his own for three years. He eventually met an Australian girl with an Australian name and an Australian accent. Her name was Maggie.

Maggie who would frequently return to the shop pretending that she had forgotten something that she had deliberately left out from the shopping list given to her by her mother, Beryl. Filip’s heart would flutter a bit about her beauty and a lot about her voice and about her bravery and lack of concern about getting caught speaking with him.

Beryl vehemently objected to Maggie seeing a widower of Polish and German descent, let alone with a young son. For Beryl, this was incomprehensible. However, Maggie and Filip started dating and soon enough, they were married.

Maggie was like a mother for Szymon. He called her "mama" which is Polish for mum. She looked after him very well, the way a good mother would look after her only child. Although four years later, Szymon had two half-brothers, this never changed the way Maggie treated him.

Szymon was severely teased at primary school because of his accent, the funny spelling of his Christian name and his unpronounceable last name. He was also for ever being called a wog. Filip spent several nights every week during school terms reassuring his son that he was not a wog. Filip explained that the wogs were the Greeks and the Italians but not the Polish, let alone those of German descent. This argument was of no help to Szymon and the more he explained his ancestry to his teasers, the more they teased him. Telling them he was German made matters worse for reasons he never understood at that time.

Szymon’s two half-brothers were born in Sydney and were given Australian names. Szymon thought they were spoiled both at home and at school, but he never shared his thoughts with anyone, not even Filip. He did not want to risk hurting his father’s feelings or disturbing his happiness, especially after losing Katarzyna.

The half-brothers’ Australian Christian names and the lack of a foreign accent conferred them enough protection from bullying despite their unpronounceable last name. The middle child, Robert, Maggie’s first child, finished school, but only just. He worked as a check-out chick at the local Woollies and lived with his