Today we started the day by hopping on an hour-long boat ride on the Tigre River to the Rio Capitan primary care center. The center served about a two hour radius on the river. Similar to yesterday they provided services to the surrounding areas for primary care. The services included dentistry, gynecology, general check ups and vaccinations. Beyond just the building off of the river, they had a traveling boat which was roughly the same size as the building that went to the local residence instead of them coming to the building. This public primary clinic had one ambulance boat for the whole area. However, if the water was too low, the ambulance could not run. We then went to lunch in the Porta de Frutas area called Vivanco. We then had a little free time to walk around that area. From there we drove to the San Isidro municipality to see their public hospital. We learned about the financing of this municipality. This public hospital is funded 40% from provincial taxes and 60% from local taxes. Ideally only the municipality’s residents can get service, however because the hospital is better than the surrounding ones they get patience from other municipalities. Because of this large influx of people into hospitals, they have less room for people who more directly need complex hospice care. This is why they want to redirect their attention to the primary care facilities. They try to promote the primary care facilities by incorporating this mobile specialty truck that visits neighborhoods to provide care.
We also got the unique experience (especially for me as a business student) to be in an active ICU and step down unit which was a very interesting experience that changed the way I view my current conditions as well as what I am grateful to have in the US.
Through education and promotion of the primary care facilities, Argentina hopes to decrease the amount of patients admitted into the hospital and decrease the time that they stay in the hospital so that costs can go down and problems can be treated at the root to never get to the complex stages. They are enforcing this by cracking down more on the San Isidro residents getting priority over neighboring members of other municipalities.
