Visit to the hospital

On Monday afternoon after lunch (yesterday), I went with the other students in my group to visit the public hospital in Xela, called “Regional Occidente.” It was interesting to see the extensive capacity and as well as the limitations of the main public provider of health care in Xela and the surrounding area.

Occidente provides consults for a good amount of medical specialties: general medicine, surgery (general/plastics/neuro), hematology, dermatology, among others. However, they do not have oncology/radiology. Patients with cancer have to go to Guatemala City to get treatment.

The Guatemalan government, since the mid 1990s, provides public health care, and in theory, all medical care is free (the government pays the salaries of the staff), but in reality there is not enough money to support the size of the population, medicine, and equipment. Occidente has the only trauma center in the area surrounding Xela, and the center gets over 100 patients each day. Patients can get free consults in the morning, but in many cases, they have to pay for certain (sometimes very expensive) aspects of their treatment like laboratory tests.

The tour was very eye-opening in general. I was surprised at how nice the nurses were (two different nurses were our guides, leading us throughout patient rooms and constantly answering our questions (sometimes in quite broken Spanish). I hope to learn more about the health system here when I start my own volunteer work in a hospital next week (possibly the Tuberculosis/AIDS specialty hospital here in Xela). Seeing a health system so different from the U.S. is really helping me broaden my perspective of medicine, and I hope that this will help me later in my career.