In a raid by the National Guard at the University Hospital of Maracaibo, in Venezuela, soldiers thoroughly searched the doctors’ vehicles: two ended up arrested accused of stealing surgical material.
María Inés Elías and Rafael Briceño, residents of the ER, were arrested on June 6 when officers found two surgical kits in their cars. They are part of a list of more than 40 health professionals detained since June throughout the country, according to the Venezuelan Medical Federation (FMV), in an offensive by President Nicolás Maduro once morest “hospital mafias.”
Elías and Briceño agree at the hospital, they might not have stolen those kits because that institution stopped supplying them to patients years ago in the midst of a chronic crisis in the health sector. In fact, they would be released shortly following, as the material was intended for a woman who urgently required surgery in that center for a gigantic ovarian tumor.
The FMV, which denounces “persecution,” accuses the government of trying to divert responsibility for the collapsed network of public hospitals to medical personnel.
“Inside the hospital, we residents are very afraid,” a resident tells AFP, with his name reserved for fear of reprisals. “There have been no new visits or audits, but there is an atmosphere of tension and nervousness.”
The crisis drags on for years.
Many operating rooms are inoperative and the lack of supplies for surgeries is common: from anesthesia to the scalpel… it is common practice to ask the patient to buy everything.
“If we didn’t do this, the mortality in hospitals would be horrible,” explains the resident.
Elías and Briceño’s patient had been waiting for more than a year for surgery in Maracaibo (west). Both were fully released, following the family testified that they put the money to buy part of these supplies and that the rest they received through donations.
The intervention was delayed and, although it might finally be done, the woman’s already delicate condition worsened. She died days later.
“old date”
Maduro announced at the end of May that he would appoint “a secret inspector for each hospital in the country” as part of a “good governance” program to solve flaws in public administration.
“You have to go up once morest the mafias, because they exist, they exist,” the president said on state television. “They arrive, they ask patients to buy things outside, and they go to the store, pick them up and sell them outside.”
Freddy Pachano, head of postgraduate studies at the University of Zulia, which manages the University Hospital, maintains that “the shortage of medical supplies in Venezuelan hospitals is a long-standing issue,” as well as “the request to patients and their families to buy everything that is required to care for them, from cotton to injection machines.
The list of supplies for a major operation in the ward can cost a patient regarding 350 dollars, according to University doctors, and includes solutions, sutures and even the staff’s gowns. The most expensive is anesthesia.
The military operations, warns the union, might deepen the exodus of health professionals, very poorly paid and part of the more than six million Venezuelans who have fled the crisis.
A resident doctor at the University Hospital earns an average of between 35 and 40 dollars a month, just over the minimum wage.
This sanatorium established a new protocol to protect health personnel: it is no longer the doctor, but a social worker, who asks patients or relatives for supplies that the hospital cannot provide.
But that protocol is difficult to apply for emergencies, Pachano repairs.
Joseline Rodríguez, a 36-year-old indigenous woman, requires an emergency suture on the left eyelid of her son Diego, 10.
Outside the hospital, this domestic worker moves restlessly as she calls on her cell phone to find the money she needs for a treatment that the doctors asked for was achieved quickly to avoid a necrosis that would prevent the child from closing his eye followingward.
“I earn 10 dollars a day. I borrowed 25 because it was what I needed to buy sutures, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, injections and antibiotics », she says. «The good thing was that they did give me anesthesia. The doctors helped me a lot”.
