“Some people visited us from language revision and said that we had to write everything in Armenian starting from October 1” – say the stuff members of #19 polyclinic. This is not the only polyclinic facing this problem. “We are informed that almost all the medical centers are faced with this problem. There are already a lot of cases when people having Russian education resign from medical centers, but their resignations were not accepted, because they had honestly written that the reason had been the language barrier. But now the management makes those people write different reasons for resignation”- said the staff members of #19 polyclinic.
If they continue this process, the health care system will lose a lot of specialists. In addition, worst things can happen too. If the Russian-speaking doctors agree with the requirements of the language revision and prescribe medicines in Armenian, which they don’t know well, our health care system will collapse. “About 80 % of Armenian specialists have Russian education. How can they abuse our rights like this in case when we don’t have even any good medical books in Armenian”,-said the head of the polyclinic’s children’s department Svetlana Ovchiyan. She has a Russian education too and also very good professional experience. She reads the alphabet to improve her language, but this doesn’t help her: now she writes everything in Russian, and then asks someone to translate. Almost all the stuff members of this polyclinic work this way, and a lot of people take those texts home with them in order to ask someone to translate. ”’This doesn’t look like a working procedure”,-they say. ”If it took me five minutes to prescribe medicines for a patient, now I have to make them stand in the room until I finish writing some words in Armenian”,-said pediatrician Knarik Khachatryan. She was lucky because she didn’t have to start everything from learning the letters. Eye-specialist Emila Stepanyan is an emigrant from Baku. ”I am not young and I think it will be very difficult for me to learn writing in Armenian. What should we do? Leave the country?”,-said Emila Stepanyan. By the way the doctors, who started to learn Armenian just recently, do not make any mistakes when prescribing medicines yet because they help each other out and in the end come to a conclusion concerning a concrete medical term. Anyway, when looking up some forms we came to the conclusion, that those patients caughed a little, didn’t have high temperature, but they were still under treatment: at present they know only these words in Armenian. ”We feel oppressed. If other doctors look up these sickness histories in the future they will not understand anything”,- say the doctors.
By the way, it is a good thing that they managed to write the names of medicines in Latin letters.