Iceland review - 2016, Qupperneq 64

62 ICELAND REVIEW
truth. As has been the case ever since,
the money to pay for the new hospital
was, to a great extent, raised by wom-
en’s associations in Iceland. To this day,
fund-raising by women’s organizations
plays a leading role in paying for hospital
investments; the latest example being
the new children’s hospital, which was
opened in 2003 and received substantial
support from Kvenfélagið Hringurinn, a
women’s association with a decades-long
history of funding medical care for chil-
dren, paying for 90 percent of equipment
needed at the children’s hospital.
Many other improvements are paid
for by gifts. DeCode Genetics, run by
Kári Stefánsson, has pledged ISK 700
million (USD 5.5 million) to pay for a
PET/CT scanner, used to detect various
types of cancerous tumors. Not only are
there substantial health benefits, but also
savings to be made by detecting tumors
earlier. Despite the obvious benefits of
the scanner and the fact that the hospi-
tal had been asking for one since 2008,
successive governments have not come
up with the funds to buy it. It took the
single largest gift from a private donor
in the hospital’s history to provide this
leap forward. In December last year
the hospital’s director, Páll Matthíasson,
announced that the hospital had been
catapulted into modern times. How? By
another gift from a private benefactor of
ISK 150 million (USD 1.2 million) to
buy 400 new hospital beds.
WORLD CLASS
Despite the lack of public funding,
Iceland managed to build a world-class
health service. Its achievements include
the lowest rate of infant mortality in the
world and a population that is second
only to Japan in terms of longevity.
This does not come cheap. To build
hospital infrastructure for a small nation
on a sparsely-populated, isolated island,
you either need to make some tough
choices… or you can decide to go the
whole hog. The latter is pretty much
what we’ve done. When other hospitals
build emergency facilities to take care
of premature babies, for example, they
do not have to contemplate the extreme
numbers of premature babies that may
conceivably be born at any one time.
In Amsterdam you know that in an
emergency there is another hospital in
Nijmegen that can pick up the slack. In
Iceland, on the other hand, you accept
that some of the facilities may almost
never be used, just to be sure that one
life is not lost. The same goes for spe-
cialists. The population of Iceland only
calls for one specialist in some fields. But
you know you need three to have access
to that type of specialist care 24 hours
a day. So you have a greater number of
specialists than you can justify from a per
capita point of view. The upside is that
these specialists have to perform tasks
that normally fall outside their specialist
field, giving them a broader perspective.
Icelanders have been lucky in that
their doctors have gone abroad for spe-
cialization, and for some reason, most
of them have returned. This fact has
played a big role in the success of the
healthcare service. These doctors study
in Sweden, the Netherlands, Britain or
the US, and they come back equipped
with the latest knowledge and skills. But
they also return armed with friendships
and connections with their colleagues
abroad, and this means that some of the
best doctors in other countries are just
a phone call away. To successfully bring
these doctors back, we need to pay them
a decent salary, and we need to pro-
vide them with a working environment
compatible with the practice of modern
medicine. If we fail to entice a new gen-
eration of doctors to come back, we not
only miss out on their skills, but also on
their international networks.
A NEW HOSPITAL
The most important thing needed to
maintain a world-class health service
and retain our best doctors is to build
a new hospital. This has been on the
drawing board for well over a decade.
Doctors have been talking about the
need for a new hospital ever since the
Reykjavík City Hospital was merged
with the National Hospital to form the
National University Hospital back in
OPINION