Welcome back to hear about day 4 in Buenos Aires! Today our schedule was packed with past Minister of Health Province of Salta, Dr. Josefina Medrano, we visited a public hospital City of Buenos Aires, Hospital Juan A. Fernandez, and ended our day with a cultural walking tour of Recoleta.
We had a little bit of a rocky start to our day. Our bus was late to take us to our first event of the day. But we persevered and took some cabs using Latin America’s version of Uber, Cabify (for those who don’t know Uber is illegal here). At our first stop today we experienced some deja vu. We were back at  Sanatorio De Los Arcos to talk to Dr. Josefina Medrano. She talked to us about her time as Minister of Health Province of Salta. She served as minister during the Covid-19 pandemic. She told us how it was a struggle with Salta being a poor province, located far away from ports. This means getting resources was a complicated and lengthy process. Even with these challenges, Salta was able to overcome a low percentage of deaths from Covid-19. This was helpful to understand how governments and healthcare can work together.
Next, we visited Hospital Juan A. Fernandez, a public hospital in the City of Buenos Aires. We talked to Dr. Ignacio J. Previgliano, director of the hospital. He also spoke to us about how the hospital dealt with Covid-19. He went over the main goals they wanted to achieve. They wanted to strengthen hospital management and primary care through patient-centered hospitals and optimize consultations by specialty. Resource optimization would be achieved through human resource development. The automation of efficient information systems helps the public hospital able to charge those with coverage other than public coverage. They also want to continuously improve care management and administration.
Our last event of the day was a walking tour of Recoleta. We walked around learning about historical buildings and the stories behind them. Lots of us stopped to get some photos in today since it was our first tour in the daylight in casual clothes (business casual is just not the style to post on the gram). Also shout out to our friend, Julian (aka Crupi), for taking our photos and holding everyone’s belt-bag. After some photos, we went to Cementerio de la Recoleta. Here we saw the beautiful and expensive mausoleums. We particularly visited the resting places of Eva Perón, General Tomás Guido, The girl who died twice: Rufina Cambaceres, The girl and her faithful companion: Liliana Crociati de Szaszak, and more. Some of us ended our day by going to McDonald’s (yes we know were are not in the States) to try the different foods they offer here.
The day was an exciting one, to say the least. Tonight we all turned in early to get a good night’s rest because we go to visit University la Manza. Can’t wait to meet all the students tomorrow. I’ll be back tomorrow to check in!