608 Whatever’s Within Our Duties (1/2)

*Knock, knock.*

Ma Yanlin gently knocked on the door to Ling Ran's office.

”Come in.” Ling Ran's voice rang out from the room, and the sound of his voice was like music to the ears.

After Ma Yanlin opened the door, he could smell the faint scent of tangerine. He reckoned that the young nurses from the nurses' station had purchased a new type of essential oil. It was probably the favorite scent of the nurses on duty that day.

Ever since Ling Ran became the leader of a treatment group, the income of the Emergency Medical Center's medical staff had risen substantially. Aside from that, the Emergency Medical Center also had more cash to spare for their daily expenses. After all, there was only so much bonus they could give their staff members. If the Emergency Medical Center's staff members were to receive too much money, those from other departments might complain about it. As a result, all that extra money went to the funds of the department.

For example, the nurses at the nurses' station were given funds to purchase air fresheners and fragrances. The head nurse even took the opportunity to write a research paper titled ”An Exploration to Elevate the Quality of Services Provided in Wards”. Consequently, all the wards and doctors' offices no longer smelled like disinfectants.

However, the wards and the offices of other doctors almost always smelled like sandalwood or lavender. Ling Ran's office, though, was embellished with a different scent every day.

Every now and then, Ma Yanlin would make it a point to sniff the scent drifting out of the door whenever he passed by Ling Ran's office so that he could increase his knowledge and perhaps gain one percent of Ling Ran's good looks.

Unfortunately, at that moment, Ma Yanlin was not in the mood to enjoy the scent of tangerine. He furrowed his eyebrows a little and said, ”Doctor Ling, both patients with ruptured Achilles tendons who came over this morning requested that you operate on them using the Zhu-Ling Achilles Repair Technique.”

”Are both of them athletes?” Even though Ling Ran was the one who informed Ma Yanlin about the new patients, he had not met them yet. He merely relayed the message from the Emergency Department.

While Ling Ran was the leader of his treatment group and had to lead the charge in everything, he did not need to be on the front line. Basic tasks such as record-taking, physical examination, allocation of hospital beds, and filling authorization forms for medical imaging procedures as well as biochemical tests were done by junior doctors.

If these tasks were taken away from junior doctors, the hospital's cultivation system would go into a meltdown.

Similarly, if experienced senior doctors had to carry out these tasks by themselves, the hospital's cultivation system would also go into a meltdown.

Right then, Ma Yanlin felt that he was about to go through a meltdown too.

He thought things through and carefully said, going along with Ling Ran's flow, ”This is the problem: none of them are athletes. Even though they're just ordinary people, they know about the Zhu-Ling Achilles Repair Technique and have stated that they want you to operate on them. Not only that, but they specifically said they want you to operate on them using the Zhu-Ling Achilles Repair Technique.”

The regulations of most public hospitals did not allow patients to ask for specific doctors to operate on them. However, certain hospitals had reformed things by allowing patients to pay a certain fee so that they could ask for renowned doctors to operate on them. The fee for consultation was usually a few hundred RMB for these doctors.

Most reformations carried out by hospitals nowadays merely involved making unspoken rules legitimate.

For instance, surgeons from renowned hospitals, especially chief physicians rarely operated on patients in the hospitals they worked in unless the patient was related to someone they knew. They just had to make a short journey to operate on patients in a nearby hospital for freelance surgery fees of a few thousand RMB. Why would they suffer by operating on patients in the hospital they worked in and receive surgery fees that were only a few hundred RMB?

From the hospital's perspective, that was the logic of charging patients a fee to ask for specific surgeons.

However, patients could only ask for specific surgeons. It was impossible for the hospitals and surgeons to let patients choose the surgical methods they wanted.

This was because once the incision was made, they may find the patient's actual condition different from what was shown in the scans and what was expected.

They could not just suck the anesthetics out of the patient's body, wake him or her up, and discuss the desired surgical method all over again.

Aside from that, the Zhu-Ling Achilles Repair Technique was not something ordinary people would know about. Most of the time, ordinary people did not even know about renowned surgical methods. Take surgical repair for Tetralogy of Fallot as an example. All medical students knew what it was, but very few ordinary people knew about it.

Ling Ran did not think about it a lot, though. He merely said, ”If they're not athletes, there's really no need to perform open Achilles tendon repair surgery on them. How old are they?”

Ma Yanlin said, ”One is forty-eight, and the other is fifty-two.”

Ling Ran cleared his throat before he picked up his glass and drank a mouthful of water. ”And why do they want to receive open Achilles tendon repair surgery?”

”The patients insisted on it, and they specifically stated that they did not want minimally invasive surgery. The main problem is that one of the patients said that he knows a reporter or something like that, and he said that if we refuse to use the Zhu-Ling Achilles Repair Technique on him, he would expose things to the media.”

”What would he be exposing?”

”That we said no to a patient? That we did not respect the patient's wishes?” Ma Yanlin who had just operated on two patients felt like his head was about to explode when he met the two new patients earlier.

The Ling Treatment Group operated like the other treatment groups in the hospital. After a patient was taken in, the doctor-in-charge would be directly responsible for him. For patients who would be receiving surgery, the doctor-in-charge was responsible for everything aside from the surgery itself.

Everything, from minor tasks like scheduling the patient's surgery to major tasks like prescribing medication and deciding how much to charge the patient had to be done by the doctor-in-charge. They were even responsible for the patient's postoperative recovery and deciding how much care the patient should be given as long as their superiors were not in charge of those tasks.