Cancer patients go untreated due to hospital debts
A cancer centre in Palestine is turning away patients for the first time in its history, with some 500 patients turned away since September last year for one reason - it’s owed $96 million ($NZ 105 million).
The cancer unit in the Augusta Victoria Hospital in eastern Jerusalem is owed the funds from the Palestinian Authority (PA) and is unable to buy the chemotherapy drugs needed to treat patients, according to the BBC.
“It’s the first time in our history that we’ve been forced to take the decision not to accept new patients,” Dr Fadi al-Atrash, the hospital’s deputy CEO, told the BBC.
“We’re facing a very critical situation where we might be forced to close some departments in future. We might have to stop the treatment of patients already in our care.
“It means that more people might die of cancer because they’re not receiving their treatment on time, or according to the right schedule.”
A lack of funds for healthcare isn’t the only problem for the PA, which says it’s facing the worst financial crisis since it began 30 years ago, due to a combination of the pandemic, inflation and the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
Salem al-Nawati, a 16-year-old with leukaemia from Gaza, collapsed outside the PA Health Ministry in Ramallah earlier in the year and was declared dead soon after.
His uncle, Jamal al-Nawati, was fighting to secure a hospital bed for Salem, and detailed the barriers his nephew faced in accessing treatment.
Since hospitals in Gaza are ill-equipped to treat many serious cases of cancer, Salem was given a medical referral and PA financial guarantee for treatment in a private hospital in Nablus.
However, after being initially refused a travel permit by Israel, Salem arrived for treatment a month later and was turned away from the Nablus hospital because its bills hadn’t been paid by the PA.
“I was wondering what we’d done wrong, what had this poor patient ever done?” Mr al-Nawati said.
“Salem’s condition was deteriorating hour-by-hour, day-by-day. He was so sad, asking me why he was being refused treatment, and I was doing my best to reassure him.”
Though an influential family friend intervened, resulting in the PA offering to send Salem to an Israeli hospital, his permit didn’t allow him to travel there.
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