Today started with us going to hear Dra Josefina Medrano talk about her time as the Minister of Health for the province of Salta during covid. It was an honor to get to talk to her because she was the first women to take on that roll and dealt with the pandemic. Being in a province that is so rural led to her challenges being even greater than what Benos Aries was dealing with. There is great terrain in the province and no good way of transporting goods and there is poor technology. Medrano got a ton of push back on the pandemic because she calculated the death total for the country to show everyone how dire need the state was in. However, this really helped because facilities were made from convention centers and oxygen was transported across the country to make more beds and clinics for people.
After that, we went to the public hospital and got a talk from the director of the hospital. The main concept of his lecture was discussing Covid-19 and the hospital response. He had a huge responsibility with this being the biggest public hospital in the city. He was working to make sure people were being helped as much as they could, and he had no idea how to even attack this giant monster. This hospital had to prepare for a suge of respiratory illnesses, and still the same amount of people coming in that normally need a hospital. Coming from a hospital that is scraping by to get everyone care they need at the cheapest cost is a ridiculously challenging task.
On the topic of money, Scervino was talking about how he was getting normal money from the state, which can lead to the conversation of federalism. The National Ministry of Health is working primarily to get money to each of the provinces, and that is pretty much the entirety of their job. Provinces are really the ‘top dog’ for the control of health services. Some provinces can work to be in programs started the national ministry of health, but they are not required. Mostly all the power comes in from the state and state boards. The National Ministry of Health is more of a figure head for the country to have a ‘unified front’ in response to healthcare, but they really just hand out money from the world bank to all the provinces and make suggestions. The provinces don’t need to take those suggestions, they can do whatever they want.
