raise the price of supplies and activate alerts in the clinics / archive
Hospital supplies have become a nightmare for private sanatoriums in the province of Buenos Aires. According to various sources consulted, this item already equals or exceeds the wage bill, which until recently accounted for most of the cost distribution of private health centers.
Néstor Porras, president of the Federation of Clinics of the province of Buenos Aires (Fecliba), maintained that “the increase in inputs is extremely high. They hardly give us deadlines to pay them and as clinics we cannot postpone your purchase taking into account that we are taking care of people’s health. Perhaps in other items they may have another margin of action to think about a purchase on a particular item. We cannot wait and the situation becomes difficult”.
According to one of the latest reports from the Association of Private Clinics, Sanatoriums and Hospitals of the Argentine Republic (Adecra) and the Chamber of Outpatient Diagnosis and Treatment Entities (Cedim), in the third quarter of 2022 the medical supplies that The images had the highest magnification (25.1 percent); laboratory reagents (20.1 percent) and medicines and disposables (14.1 percent).
In the case of non-medical supplies, the same report reports that they had an average increase of 27.9 percent. Oxygen exceeded the average for this item, since the increase was 30.7 percent (5.9 percent above general inflation for the period, which amounted to 22 percent). Meanwhile, the food service increased 33.2 percent, and pathogenic waste 22.1 percent.
Another report from the Health Costs Observatory of the Argentine Health Union (UAS) detected increases of up to 50 percent in medical supplies used in hospitalizations in the second quarter of 2022, doubling general inflation, which in that period reached 24.8 percent. “There were spikes of up to 50 percent in supplies for hospitalizations, and also increases above inflation in high-cost remedies that can generate millionaire expenses for obras sociales and prepaid for each treatment,” it was detailed.
MISSING
The clinic sector, in addition to the increases in the costs of inputs, also have to battle with the lack of some inputs that lead to rescheduling some interventions that were already scheduled for weeks or months before.
At Fecliba, Acliba 1 and Aclife agreed that they are working with different alternatives to alleviate the situation of shortages of supplies for surgical interventions. On the one hand, there are opportunities in which they have to pay more for the input that replaces the one they usually use. They stress that for the moment the situation is “manageable” and has not reached a critical context.
