The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, announced that he will present to Congress the proposal for the Reform of the Health System, whose pillars are primary care and prevention, sources from the Presidency reported on Friday.
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During the XXI Summit of the Colombian Association of Capital Cities, held in San José del Guaviare, the president explained that the initiative seeks to stop the public hospital from being a State social enterprise and become a health institution.
«This is a mixed, complementary, non-competitive model. The public hospital ceases to be a State social enterprise, that is, to seek to minimize costs or cut service, and becomes a health institution, as it was before, “he explained.
I rate the meeting with the EPS as excellent. There is a will to move to the new model. The EPS value the need to implement the preventive health and primary care model throughout Colombia. https://t.co/V5aXXJtDgs
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo)
February 10, 2023
Petro stressed that the project seeks a structural solution to the problems that the Colombian health system faces each year, in which the fundamental pillar is to have a strong preventive and primary care model, since “the system offers individual insurance, but does not there is a family health,” he said.
«The Primary Care Center has a function, which is not only to attend to those who arrive, but also to organize a territory, with an average of 20,000 people, so that medical teams visit the family of patients permanently, routinely, and constantly. that territory,” he said.
For the president, the most important thing is to reduce the causes of the disease, eliminate it, if possible, or treat it even in a primary stage where it is still possible to save life.
«But the model of attention will be the same, both in the public and the private, as in the rich neighborhood as in the poor neighborhood. As in the rural world that today does not have a health system. The first thing that this guarantees is health in the rural world, which today has no health, ”he concluded.
As he noted, 22 percent of Colombian children have anemia and the country occupies the last places in terms of maternal mortality among the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This situation is caused by “the absence of a primary care and prevention system in Colombia,” she said.
