Tempers rising in state health sector; poor pay and dismal conditions at the center of discontent

Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): Protests continued across the country for a second day with doctors and medical staff taking the lead to demand better pay and working conditions and much-needed improvements at their places of work. Discontented doctors and staff again assembled outside several hospitals, including El Algodonal in Antímano, northwest Caracas. Reports reaching Caracas said problems persisted elsewhere in the country, with some hospitals turning away all but emergencies or the very seriously sick.

Dianella Parra, acting president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation, said the government had 30 days to start listening to what health professionals had to say.
The low level of pay for junior doctors and even further up the seniority scale at state hospitals and clinics is by now legion. Horror stories abound about what too many public hospitals are like on the inside.

Complaints range from filthy lavatories, garbage piling up in unwashed corridors, unhygienic kitchens and, all too often, the absence even of medical supplies. Relatives have to provide much of a patient's basic needs, stretching not only to bedclothes, washing materials, bandages and medicine, but also even to food. Just why this should be so in a country awash with oil remains a question to which few people seem to have an answer.

Critics note that other oil-rich countries -- most notably Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf kingdoms -- spent petrodollars on state-of-the-art medical services with highly-paid experienced staff brought in from abroad. In contrast, much of Venezuela's state health system is a shambles -- a monument to years of negligence, as one long-suffering middle-ranking doctor at a public hospital in the capital put it to this reporter. And nothing, he added, was quite as neglected as the medical staff, or at least that's how it felt.

Parra was not slow to drive this point home on the second day of protests. "We doctors have given a good demonstration of tolerance, sacrifice, of vocation, of service to the country," she said. "But given this is a government that has resources for everything excepting us, we're simply calling for attention."