Emergencies of Venezuelan hospitals without essential medicines, according to a survey
The emergencies of the 40 most important public hospitals in Venezuela do not have the essential medicines to be able to care for patients and in some cases they have more than 80% of shortages, according to the "National Survey of Hospitals" presented today.
The so-called Network Doctors for Health, which has been conducting this study for four years, presented the data collected during the week of November 10 to 16, which also includes the report of the failures of the laboratories and X-ray equipment.
"It can not be said that 50% of emergencies are closed, most are open, there are doctors, nurses, there are beds but there is no atropine (to treat heart attacks) or there are no drugs for tension or there are no anesthetic gases" , the spokesman of the network, the infectologist Julio Castro, said at a press conference in Caracas
The specialist points out that this data on medicines in emergencies was included in this survey at the request of international organizations and NGOs that want to send aid to Venezuela, a country that has been suffering from a severe shortage of drugs for more than four years.
"They (organizations) need the detail of -for example- where there is no atropine, where there is no morphine, where there is no disposable material, because they want to get through their agencies, sometimes with the government, sometimes not, to those Hospitals, especially those in the interior of the country, help, "he said.
He also reported that this latest report shows that 43% of the laboratories in these hospitals are closed, "nothing works, not a single day" and 51% of the X-ray services are closed.
In addition, "95% of hospitals are not able to make a plate or a tomography, practically all, only one of them has the capacity to do tomography or magnetic resonance," he said.
The worsening of this situation has been picked up by the Network of Physicians since 2014 because four years ago the lack of X-ray services was present in 60% of hospitals and today the percentage rose to 95%.
The network of doctors hopes that this survey will also serve to "monitor" the help that is sent through the NGOs and verify that it arrived at each hospital because, he assured, many of the medicines that have already been sent end up "bachaqueados" or resold , when they are handed over to government entities.
He indicated, however, that these aids serve to keep up with the lack of medicines but that they will not alleviate the severe failures in diagnostic equipment or in clinical laboratories.
"I believe that we are going to say in January that we will have hundreds of deaths due to the inability of hospitals to care for these people" due to the "impact related to lack of water, light, medicines" in health centers public.
