As in Denmark

“We’re going to have a health system like they have in Denmark, like they have in Canada, because it’s not a budget problem, it’s a corruption problem.”
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, 23.5.19This June 9, my radio partner Guadalupe Juárez and I posted on Twitter a photograph of the men’s emergency room of the Magdalena de las Salinas hospital of the Mexican Institute of Social Security.It showed a room bursting, with all beds full and many patients receiving treatment or waiting in chairs with serum. “It’s not Denmark,” I said. It was a Dantesque scene.
We began to receive comments from users who told us similar or worse situations in this and other hospitals and clinics of the IMSS. Some patients, they said, are treated even lying in the piso.@MauraBM1 said from the Regional General Hospital 6 of Ciudad Madero: “We have my grandmother waiting for amputation of her leg. The foot is already all necrotic and it hurts a lot what is left alive. According to @Tu_IMSS it is not a priority. The time we’ve been there we realized how there are indeed no medicines, no beds, stretchers, no wheelchairs.” The grandmother had been on a total fast, without water, since a day before, with the promise that in 36 hours she would be operated, but the order did not arrive. Hours later the same woman announced: “After this message was published they contacted me and in less than half an hour there were already the same doctors who in the morning said that it was not scheduled running, taking us sheets to sign and pass it directly to operation.”
The Social Communication Coordination of the IMSS responded to our tweets with a strange information card. He said that the Hospital of Traumatology, Orthopedics and Physical Rehabilitation of the IMSS “is a reference at the national level. On a typical day it serves 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 divides the conditions by colors to provide rapid attention, from critical states to less urgent situations. The patients who are in the observation area are in stable conditions, since they were previously protocolized to perform surgical treatment if necessary. On a permanent basis, the necessary steps are taken to expedite the attention of the beneficiaries, 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 the country. That is precisely why its saturation is worrisome. It is not the fault of the medical staff, who do heroic work, without the indispensable breaks and despite the unprecedented shortages of medicines, equipment and even sheets and towels.
Neither Magdalena de las Salinas nor the other public health facilities were ever 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 by December 2019 we would have a system like the Danish one, but it would seem 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
As health crumbles, the government has announced a plan to rescue the company Altán Redes from the internet. The cost will be about $350 million. The president has forgotten that he promised not to bail out private companies.



Original source in Spanish

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