Before I get into today’s blog, I just wanted to say happy International Nurse’s Day. Since learning more and more about the healthcare system, both in the United States and in Argentina, I can confidently say that without nurses, our healthcare systems would not be able to function. It is because of them that patients are able to receive fast, efficient, high-quality care and healthcare would not be where it is today without them.

We started off the morning with a boat trip to a primary care clinic on the Rio Capitan in the municipality of Tigre. The best equivalent I can give is the Everglades in Florida where a lot of houses are only accessible by boat. This primary care clinic was open 24 hours every single day and was responsible for the care of everyone within a two hour radius of their clinic. Despite being in such a unique location and having to serve people quite far away, they had boats designated as ambulances and a mobile clinic that makes access to healthcare easier for the people that live in the delta of Rio Capitan.

After visiting the primary care clinic, we headed over to the neighboring city of San Isidro where we toured their public hospital that is funded entirely by their municipality and the province of Buenos Aires with tax dollars. The biggest problem they mentioned at the Hospital San Isidro is that since they have no primary care clinics in San Isidro, they receive an overwhelming amount of patients in the hospital itself as well as many people from the neighboring cities that are trying to access healthcare in the wealthier San Isidro, which causes a bed shortage in the hospitals. While they have received more funding in the past year or so to update their way out-of-date equipment and machines, they mentioned how they can’t do anything about the bed shortage without the opening of a primary care clinic since hospital care is far more expensive for the state than primary care.

What I noticed in both the clinic and the hospital is the advocacy for access to primary care. Primary care as a whole is cheaper for the public healthcare system as it is cheaper to administer and does not take up as many specialized resources that come with staying in a hospital. However, it is hard to decide that all of a sudden they should invest more into primary care when hospitals, even those in wealthier areas of Buenos Aires such as San Isidro, are lacking in up-to-date technology in their ICUs and general admission wards. At one point, we were even told that some of their operating tables up until six months ago were from the 1970s. So while investing in more preventative and primary care access is good in the long run for the public healthcare sector, it is difficult to divert funds away from the hospitals when they are so behind in modern healthcare technology. When we asked about it too, they said it is not really something that directors in the public sector make; rather, the government diverts funds to wherever it deems necessary and the public sector has to follow suit, making it difficult to advocate for more funding in updating hospitals vs. investing in primary care access.