Changing up our form of transportation today, we took a boat ride to visit the public hospital of Tigre! On the way to the public hospital, we were greeted with beautiful scenery surrounding the Sarmiento river’s edges. This was the first hospital of the trip that we visited that was part of the public sector, and there was a very significant difference between this hospital and the private hospital from yesterday. The Tigre public hospital was very tiny and had very limited resources. We talked with one of the SET personnel, which is Argentina’s form of an EMT, as well as a nurse from the hospital and they explained the hospitals main challenges. For example, the hospital has one ambulance, and it is a tiny speed boat. This one ambulance must service around 15,000 people, which can triple during the summer months, across 200 kilometers. The hospital itself only has a couple of doctors, including a dentist and a psychiatrist, and a few nurses. One of the main issues this hospital, as well as much of the public sector, faces is the lack of being able to communicate with other healthcare providers as sometimes the Wi-Fi doesn’t work in remote areas of Tigre. Another issue is accessibility for patients to get to the hospital. On the Sarmiento River, the fog can make the visibility dangerously low which forces the ambulance boat to stay put instead of going out to reach patients.
After this visit, we traveled to another public hospital, by bus this time! This hospital was the public hospital of San Isidro, and we had a lecture with a former ICU nurse who is now the subsecretary of Healthcare Planning for the hospital. During this lecture we learned a lot about the challenges with the allocation of resources between primary care and the public sector hospitals. We learned that there is a major push from public hospitals to the Ministries of Health to allocate resources from hospitals to primary care facilities. This would allow more preventative care measures to be implemented to decrease the number of patients that end up in hospitals for a longer period of time. However, the ministries are very resistant to this idea as they believe the resources are needed elsewhere, such as in the hospitals. This belief comes from the idea that there are a large number of patients who need to be currently treated in the hospitals and allocated money to primary care facilities would cause challenges to helping these patients. The main issue between primary care and hospitals in the public sector is a debate between what is beneficial in the long-term and what is beneficial now. While diverting resources and money to primary care would help treat more people and keep more people out of the hospitals, in the long-term, there would be a lack of resources to treat the current patients in hospitals.
We were then given the opportunity to tour the ICU of San Isidro’s hospital. This tour was extremely shocking as we quickly learned there is a major difference between the US hospitals and this one. The patients had less privacy in the setup of this hospital as there were no curtains separating patients, and the beds were seemingly close together, which was very interesting to observe.
Tip of the Day: Apply bug spray even if you don’t think there are any bugs! While we were at the public hospital of Tigre, there were lots of mosquitoes flying around and some of our group members got some pretty gnarly bites today.
