The National Hospital Survey (ENH, its acronym in Spanish), released this Wednesday (3) in Venezuela, showed that the economic disaster of Chavismo has scrapped the country's public health infrastructure and forces the majority of Venezuelans to pay out of pocket. pocket for supplies that should be provided free of charge to undergo surgeries.
In a presentation broadcast online, the research coordinator, Julio Castro, stated that last year only 40% of operating rooms in public hospitals in Venezuela were operational, within the country's average for the last five years.
An alarming number from ENH is that in 90% of the hospitals surveyed (the organization Doctors for Health collected data from the 40 largest institutions in Venezuela) patients are asked to pay for at least one input for emergency or elective surgeries to be performed.
On average, each patient has to pay US$81, the equivalent of 22.5 minimum wages, according to the Efecto Cocuyo website.
“Someone might say, '$81 is not enough.' Well, it depends on how much you earn. It is not the same thing to be a secretary of a ministry and work as a street vendor or in a private company. Today, Venezuelans have to dip into their pockets to pay for surgery in the public sector, even though in theory they are free for patients. In international data, Venezuela is the country with the highest out-of-pocket expenditure on health,” said Castro.
The coordinator added that this amount is just an average and there are many cases in which Venezuelans have to pay for more expensive supplies, such as prosthetics whose price can reach US$4,000.
ENH pointed out that 815 patients who died from a heart attack and 490 from accidents could have been saved in 2023 in the hospitals surveyed if there had been no shortage of equipment, medicines and personnel.
“These deaths are, in the opinion of our contacts on site, deaths that could have been avoided if the hospital had been in better conditions. In other words, it is the 'cost' in lives of the deficiencies in our health centers”, pointed out the study.
Other data from ENH showed that only 10% of hospitals are capable of carrying out tomography, and that “at any given time, never 24 hours”, and 30% do not have x-ray equipment.
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