The crisis of public health system in Cuba it gets worse day by day. To the input shortage and medicines to supply hospitals and clinics, and the deep deterioration of the infrastructure, is added lack of medical personnel. According to official dataIn 2022, 12,065 fewer doctors worked on the Island than in 2021.
The data included in the Statistic yearbook of 2022, published by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), indicate that from 312,406 professionals in 2021, medical health personnel rose to 281,098 in 2022. In the case of doctors with some specialty, it went from 106,131 in 2021 to 94,066 in 2022.
The specialty of stomatology also registered a reduction of professionals. Of 20,903 who provided service in 2021, some 17,657 remained in 2022, a loss of 3,246 workers that was reflected in the consultations. While in 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, 13,685 were offered, in 2022 there were only 5,261, the lowest figure in the last ten years. The highest data from 2019, when 33,200 stomatology consultations were registered.
The The decrease in staff is also notable in the number of nurses, which fell from 86,983 in 2021 to 79,569 last year, for some 7,414 nursing technicians and graduates who left public health institutions.
According to data collected by the Cubadata projectthrough a Comprehensive Health Survey, 57.6% of respondents who were asked about the possibility of getting medical care on the island He responded that he had “great difficulty” or that it was “impossible” to access those services.
In this specific survey of Cubadata 2,050 people participated throughout the country between August 15, 2022 and August 31, 2022. The results put into perspective a reality that transcends daily on social networks and independent media, through complaints and pleas for help from Cubans .
The Minister of Public Health, Jose Angel Portal Miranda, qualified 2022 as a year of “significant obstacles” and “surmountable deficiencies”, a situation that affected patients and the health sector workers themselves consider “the worst in the history of the Revolution.”
A constant that has also influenced current statistics and the drastic reduction of health personnel It has been the increase in Cuban doctors who leave the country or leave their jobs in the face of the crisis in the public health system. Among those most covered by the media are doctors Manuel Guerra, Alexander Raúl Pupo Casas and Alexander Jesús Figueredo, who today live outside of Cuba.
“I get a lump in my throat to see how our heroes in white coats abandon what they love to do, save lives, because their salary doesn’t even give them enough to buy a pair of shoes,” a Cuban told the independent journalist on condition of anonymity. Alberto Arego, referring to the case of his sister.
The doctor gave up her career and her position and explained to her sister that she asked to leave to “find something” to help her support her children.
He has also recently expressed the will to leave his practice at the Calixto García Hospital Dr. Alina Arcos, after being unable to exercise their profession correctly. “I can no longer cure or relieve because I don’t have the resources to do it,” she wrote on her social media.
According to an article published by Café Fuerte, “more than 50% of the group of doctors Holguin residents who protested in August 2021 for the lack of medicines and supplies to face the Covid-19″. These doctors responded to the first mminister, Manuel Marrero Cruzwho accused them of poor patient care at that time of crisis.
Previously, from 2008 to 2018, a total of 98,000 jobs disappeared in the Ministry of Public Health, when the sector underwent “a restructuring process”, as concluded an investigation of DIARIO DE CUBA published in 2019.
FOUNTAIN: diariodecuba.com
