Public health doctors protest deteriorating hospital conditions as patients bring own meds to surgery
Dozens of doctors, nurses and patients protested Wednesday outside a hospital in Quito, expressing outrage at a public health care system so overstretched that patients wait months for surgery and are forced to bring their own syringes and medication to the hospital.
The Vincent Corral Hospital in Cuenca.
Medical professionals in Guayaquil and Cuenca supported the protest with declarations of support that listed shortages of equipment, medicine and personnel in the hospitals and clinics in their cities.
One source of anger is that the Health Ministry announced last week that as many as 1,300 medical professionals will be dismissed from the health care system in the coming weeks. The government says it is “optimize resources” and eliminating staff “redundancy”. Among those to be fired, according to the ministry, are doctors, nurses and support staff that protestiers say are essential.
“We do not have what we need to work,” said Juan Barriga, head of trauma treatment at Pablo Arturo Suarez Hospital in Quito, where the rally took place.
He said there are long waiting lists for people who need emergency operations and “patients buy what they need to undergo surgery.”
Indeed, in Ecuador patients are known to bring their own medication, needles, suture thread and other equipment when they go to the hospital.
The dismissals will also affect health care at Ecuador’s violent and overcrowded prisons, where a tuberculosis outbreak has infected an estimated 5,000 inmates.
A surgeon is Cuenca’s Vicente Corral Hospital said that patients are waiting for as long as ten months for operations at his hospital. “Some of these people suffer with fast-spreading cancers and we have to tell them they will have to wait for surgery,” the doctor, who asked not to be identified, said. He added that almost half of the hospital’s operating rooms are “out of service” due to broken equipment and lack of anesthesia.
A hospital administrator in Guayaquil, who also asked to remain unnamed for fear of termination, said he doesn’t have the budget to control a rat infestation in the hospital. He pointed out that in the last three years the budget for Ecuador’s public health system has increased 2% while the national budget has increased 19%. “The people we serve, who mostly poor, are a very low priority with this government,” he said, adding that he believed pressure from the International Monetary Fund was one reason for the funding crisis.
Outside the Quito hospital, doctors in white lab coats, nurses in uniform, patients and relatives carried signs with slogans such as “there are no supplies. No medicine, the health care system is collapsing.”
Barriga said that at his hospital alone, one of the largest in the state care system, more than 1,000 people are on a list waiting for surgery.
President Daniel Noboa, a conservative in power since 2023 and staunch ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, appointed his sixth health minister on Monday.
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Credit: AFP
