translated from Spanish: Bill seeks hospitals for children to care for under-18s

Senator Guido Girardi (PPD), together with Santiago Rebolledo, mayor of La Cisterna, and Julio Gil, father of Fernanda Gil (15 years), with tetraplegia for congenital vascular malformation, denounced this Saturday that the Hospital Exequiel González Cortés dene he gave attention to the child on the grounds that at that age he is already an adult. The parliamentarian noted that he will support the remedy for protection that the father, together with Mayor Rebolledo, filed with the Court of Appeals of San Miguel, as they call the action arbitrary, illegal, cruel and violates the right to life and international treaties protection for children. In addition, they called on the Executive, through the Minister of Health, Jaime Mañalich, to immediately establish a rule requiring public hospitals to consider adults only those over 18 years of age. Senator Girardi noted that “this case seems illegal, irregular, painful and of cruel decriteria. This is Fernanda Gil, a 15-year-old girl who has a vascular malformation of the brainstem and who suffered three strokes that left her tetraplegic, but with her intellectual abilities intact: she has feelings, emotions, she connects, but she does not you can talk. It’s a very dramatic situation.” She added that “in November, in November, a respiratory box she arrived at the Barros Luco Hospital Post, where she was stabilized and sent to the Exequiel González Children’s Hospital, where they refuse to hospitalize her because they only receive children under 15 years of age according to a circular without legal value, because in Chile, as confirmed by all international treaties, those under the age of 18 are considered children. That is, an absolutely arbitrary decision is applied here to deny attention to a person who is at a level of dramatic fragility.” The parliamentarian revealed that he has already made “a presentation to the director of the Health Service, Dr. Carmen Aravena, raising that this is completely irregular because a 2012 circular authorizes paediatric establishments to care for patients until the age of 19 11 months and 29 days of age.” The legislator added that “we will support the protection resource filed by the father with Mayor Rebolledo, we will go to the Children’s Office and introduce a law that guarantees the right of children not to be denied care in any hospital Chile, least in Fernanda’s state of fragility. And while we’re doing the law, we’re going to ask The Minsal to have the children cared for in ad hoc hospitals without considering economic aspects involved.” Lawyer Julio Gil, Fernanda’s father, indicated that the hospital’s decision “violates (his daughter) his constitutional right to life, physical integrity, health and also the international conventions signed by Chile, mainly the Convention of Human Rights of the Child who, in his first article, points out that all human beings under the age of 18 are children and there is no rule or law that can be on that.” For his part, Mayor Rebolledo ruled that “the right health was one of the main concerns expressed in the consultation that we made the municipalities, because here are the abuses of the private and also of the state. And here there is a blatant abuse, it is inconceivable that the Minsal will cover this abuse against the right of children through arbitrary or prerogative circulars of some middle command.”

Original source in Spanish