Breathe
By Adela Navarro Bello
As of 2024, 100 percent of the General Hospitals, previously under the authority and budget (even mixed) of the state governments, will be fully integrated to the health sector of the Mexican Government, in what they had to misnamed IMSS Bienestar (IMSS Welfare), because it has basically become a fatal discomfort for patients and treating physicians due to the criminal shortage of medicines, supplies and personnel to provide medical care to all those Mexicans who do not have any type of social security, whether it be Social Security, ISSSTE, in the case of Baja California Issstecali, and who do not have private medical insurance either.
In Tijuana, the General Hospital -now IMSS Bienestar- is going through its biggest crisis in the last 20 years. Doctors who requested anonymity, since they have been warned from the center of the country not to talk to the press about what is happening inside the hospitals, confided to this columnist that they are operating under very serious pressure, with a 50% shortage of medicines, a 50% shortage of supplies and a dangerous shortage of doctors, nurses, orderlies, chemists, among other specialties required to provide medical care.
If the services provided are successful, it is because of the direct contribution of the patient's family members. For example, if a person is admitted to undergo a cesarean section, he/she is given a list of what to bring/bring for the cesarean section: "... a box of mouth covers, two spinal needles, a cesarean bundle, shoe covers, a cystoflo (urine collection bag), a Foley catheter #14 and #16, an anesthesia circuit, a 3000 ml suction bag, mask with reservoir, a knob, a gastric tube #8, two pieces of umbilical clamp, a neonatal valve bag, Hartman solution 1000 ml, two pieces of chromic suture 2.0, 1.0 vicryl suture, adult nasal prongs, neonatal nasal prongs, endotracheal cannula 3, endotracheal cannula 7".
The doctors guide the family members on where to buy the supplies, where they can buy them at better prices and of better quality, and only when the list is stocked, the intervention is carried out.
As this one is ready to perform a cesarean section, another one is delivered for each of the interventions performed at the General Hospital IMSS Bienestar, because there are no medicines available for users and patients and there are not enough supplies for everyone, "we don't even have serums," says a doctor in frustration.
And he adds: "It happens every day, for procedures, for lumbar punctures, catheters, pleural tubes, everyday functions, to save people's lives we have to ask for outpatients, medicines, supplies, sutures, other hospitals lend them to us".
Indeed, since this medical sector was transferred to the Mexican Government, it survives thanks to the contribution of patients' families and the charity of other hospitals, such as the Red Cross, or in Tijuana, Florence or Excel, private hospitals that donate to General IMSS Bienestar. "In 20 years, we have not had this level of shortage," confided another of the doctors.
When, from their experience of more than 20 years in the public health sector, they are asked why they believe this lack of attention and shortage of medicines and supplies is due to a "transition from one health system to a different one, which was done without planning".
Complement:
"There was no planning as to what was going to be done with the personnel, with the infrastructure, with the unions, it was not planned, first with an Insabi that the people who managed it did not know the health system; then with IMSS Bienestar without vision, without planning, without objective, just on a whim. Today you want to see the organizational chart at the national level, there are many holes everywhere, it was created at the end of a six-year term, when the budgets were modified, it was the end and the doctors and the patients paid the price ".
