Today was mostly spent exploring the Palermo and Recoleta neighborhoods in the northern part of the city. Our first stop was Sanatorio Mater Dei, one of the nicest private hospitals or clinics we have seen so far on the trip. The building felt very modern, organized, and welcoming. After that, we visited Hospital General de Agudos Juan A. Fernández, which is a public hospital. It reminded me a lot of the San Isidro hospital we visited earlier in the week, but it seemed to have newer and more updated technology. Our final stop was Clínica Bazterrica, another private hospital that was very similar to Mater Dei in terms of appearance and overall atmosphere.

The biggest thing I noticed between the private hospitals and the public hospital was how differently they approached patient care and the patient experience. The private hospitals focused a lot on presentation, comfort, and creating a very clean and professional environment for patients. They honestly looked more like hospitals you would expect to see in the United States. On the other hand, the public hospital seemed more focused on simply providing quality medical care with the resources available to them. Another interesting difference we learned about was that the private hospitals did not perform transplant surgeries, while the public healthcare system did offer those procedures. That was surprising to me because I would have expected the private hospitals to provide more specialized treatments. Overall, the quality of care itself did not seem drastically different between the public and private sectors, but the way the care was presented, organized, and experienced by patients was very different.