Today we visited two completely different types of healthcares. First we went to Tomas Reggio Primary Health Community. This is a primary preliminary health care clinic that focuses on caring for the public. This building was ran by Nuns and provided care to a specific community in a municipal. The 3 ways it was funded was the municipal, community, and overall government. The building though small served many different specialties of primary care such as pediatrics, gynecology, dental, ect. Sister Maria who manages this building gave us a tour and some yummy tea! One thing that is interesting is how unprotected their pharmacy was. All medicine was out in the open in a separate building. This clinic functions from volunteer doctors, nurses, and secretaries who take the extra time to help a community in need. The lack of doctors able to take off of work due to low income and long hours, they are now struggling with finding a dentist. The clinic might have been small but it serves its community well and provides free healthcare to those in need around the community. One of my favorite memories was the Children’s home they also serve next door. There we were able to spend time with the children during their recess and play “Mancha” which is the Spanish way of saying Tag. The children come here to be taken care of before school to prevent them from being on the streets while their parents must work.
Continuing the day we saw a dramatic difference between a small low funded public clinic to a large private hospital called Austral Universidad Hospital. This hospital preformed high trauma care compared to just a primary care clinic. They specialized in vast areas such as hematology and oncology. The building was very high tech and had a lot of staff including doctors and nurses. This private hospital has its own insurance company that allows you premium care compared to coverage of prepaid plans. During our time we got to see different areas of the hospitals with current nurses that work there.
Overall the major difference between the low income clinic and this private hospital was the vast care the private hospital was able to provide and how many people can be served at once. During a presentation they told us around 220 beds are at use in the hospital while at the clinic they only could do primary care and could not house those in acute or critical need. What was also different was the duties of the nurses. While in the hospital, nurses focus only on their patients and in the clinic the nurse explained she did everything from scheduling appointments, to communicating with doctors to ask for volunteers they had so much to do. I really appreciated how much they had to do and it put a huge perspective on lower income care and the chronic stress it puts on employees. Overall it was such a great day and I can’t wait for tomorrow!
