“We are going to have a health system like the one they have in Denmark, like the one they have in Canada, because it is not a budget problem, it is a corruption problem”
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, 23.5.19
This June 9, my radio partner Guadalupe Juárez and I published on Twitter a photograph of the emergency room for men at the Magdalena de las Salinas hospital of the Mexican Institute of Social Security.
It showed a packed room, with all the beds full and many patients receiving treatment or waiting on chairs with IVs. “It’s not Denmark,” I commented. It was a Dantesque scene.
We began to receive comments from users who told us of similar or worse situations in this and other IMSS hospitals and clinics. Some patients, they said, are cared for even lying on the floor.
@MauraBM1 said from the Regional General Hospital 6 of Ciudad Madero: “We have my grandmother waiting for her leg to be amputated. Her foot is already all necrotic and it hurts a lot what she has left alive.
According to @Tu_IMSS it is not a priority. The time we have been there we realized how in effect there are no medicines, beds, stretchers, or wheelchairs.
The grandmother had been on a total fast, without water, since the day before, with the promise that in 36 hours they would operate on her, but the order did not come. Hours later, the same woman announced: “After this message was published, they contacted me and in less than half an hour the same doctors were already there who said that in the morning it was not scheduled to run, taking us sheets to sign and go directly to the operation.”
The IMSS Social Communication Coordination responded to our tweets with a strange information card. He said that the IMSS Hospital for Traumatology, Orthopedics and Physical Rehabilitation “is a benchmark at the national level.
On a typical day, it provides service to an average of 600 patients in the emergency department. Derived from the demand in the service, medical care is prioritized and expedited according to the triage traffic lights, which divide the ailments by color to provide rapid care, from critical states to less urgent situations.
The patients who are in the observation area are in stable conditions, since they were previously protocolized for surgical treatment if necessary. On a permanent basis, the necessary procedures are carried out to speed up the attention of the right holders, safeguard their integrity and make the processes more efficient to provide a better service”.
Magdalena de las Salinas is certainly a “reference” hospital. Opened in 1981, it has been the best public hospital for traumatology and orthopedics in the Valley of Mexico and perhaps in the country. That is precisely why its saturation is worrying.
It is not the fault of the medical personnel, who do a heroic job, without the necessary breaks and despite the unheard of shortages of medicines, equipment and even sheets and towels.
Neither Magdalena de las Salinas nor the other public health facilities were always like this. The deterioration has been strong in recent years, but only in the last six months have these saturation levels been reached.
The problem is not the previous administrations, but the decisions of this government. The president promised that in December 2019 we would have a system like the Danish one, but it seems that its purpose is to privatize health.
For now, private pharmacy offices have already become the first point of contact for patients in the face of the failure of public health. No pharmacy, however, can replace a trauma hospital.
Altan
While health is crumbling, the government has announced a plan to rescue the Internet company Altán Redes. The cost will be about 350 million dollars. The president has forgotten that he promised not to bail out private companies.
#denmark