Venezuelan doctors have warned that the country’s health care system has been left improvised to treat victims of Wednesday’s earthquake after decades of neglect.
“Venezuela’s health care system is in gradual decline,” Dr. Huniades Urbina-Medina, a pediatrician and former president of Venezuela’s National Academy of Medicine, told CNN.
The doctor and his colleagues said they had been warning officials about this “decline” since Hugo Chávez won the 1998 election.
Urbina Medina said the country is far below the level of investment recommended by the World Health Organization. “We lack the resources we need to deal with day-to-day problems,” he said.
The medical expert said people are flocking to hospitals and receiving treatment in hallways, but health workers are improvising because they can’t access the resources they need.
“There is no way to take care of them,” Urbina Medina said. “We have no medical gases, painkillers, anesthetics or antibiotics.”
The veteran doctor said everything from beds to painkillers to disposable gowns is in short supply in Venezuela, and patients are sometimes asked to buy their own supplies before surgery.
Urbina Medina said that only proper investments can avoid medical shortages in the event of another earthquake disaster in the future. “We need to prepare our hospitals,” he said. “It will be renovated according to international standards and stocked with supplies for at least 72 hours.”
“If we don’t have a plan, if we don’t have someone in charge of creating that plan, we end up… just stumbling through life… and never learning anything.”
