Today we took a boat trip on the Tigre River to the Tigre Clinic public hospital. This hospital was in a pretty poor area and served provinces within a 2-hour distance. I noticed that this can be very inefficient and could cause problems for the clinic and people because they also only have one ambulance boat that goes around to the islands. This public hospital is fully funded by the state, but it was still a little run-down. It was interesting to see that the equipment and some of the tools seemed old and unsanitary. You would think that the doctors and the city would want clean and useful tools to have, but it seemed money was still tight, and they couldn’t get what they needed for full prevention and protection.

After this, we ended up going to the hospital, San Isidro, which was a public hospital, and was very nice, and had many amenities within the hospital. We got the pleasure to speak with an exectutive name Maria, who’s on the board of directors. She told us about the funding and their plan on primary care vs public hospitals. They want to move people more to primary care for things not as serious, so people who need actual care can have better care and quicker care at the hospital. They recently got new and better equipment at the hospital, which helped them out immensely in their incline. They said the primary didn’t really lose any funding while this was going on, so that’s a good sign for them. They are also always moving towards promotion and prevention, which is very important for them to become more efficient and get more people out of the hospital. They said the nursing salaries are pretty low there because it’s public, so more of the money goes towards the hospital.

Overall, the funding is a very weird system, and where the money goes. The government also has an impact on it because it changed governments after a long time, and they said funding is iffy for other provinces vs others. It was very interesting to see the funding vs the hospital and primary care in each province and how the wealth gap also affects that.