The leadership of the Dominican Medical Guild (CMD), including its president Dr. Wilson Roa, says the situation at the Jose Maria Cabral y Baez Regional University Public Hospital in Santiago is “dramatic, interminable and unbearable.” This was Roa’s comment after touring the largest public hospital in the Cibao, and certainly one of the largest in the nation. The hospital has been undergoing a remodeling for the last five years.
Dr. Roa said that a similar situation is experienced at the Altagracia Maternity Hospital in Santo Domingo and other public hospitals subject to remodeling. He said that the problem is that while the remodeling slowly proceeds, the hospitals are invalidated from providing the services required by the people, and there is no end in sight.
He said the CMD is fighting for a real health system, “because business cannot be the guideline for the right to public health for Dominicans.” He said that little by little the health service of the country has fallen into the hands of “intermediaries”—the local HMOs—and this is not a good thing for preventive medicine.
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El Nacional
4 March 2019