health

Chepo hospital is sick

The health care facility is plagued with structural and maintenance problems.

The Chepo regional hospital is as 'sick' as those who go there daily seeking healthcare.

It is easy to see why the hospital, which attends to 600 to 700 patients a day, requires urgent attention.

Just after stepping inside the hospital and into the waiting room, a feeling of suffocation sets in as patients and their families use anything at hand to stir the air in the room because the air conditioner is broken.

Luis Leoncio López, national secretary of the Asociación de Funcionarios Administrativos de la Caja de Seguro Social (CSS), said the air conditioner suffered a sudden "collapse." He doesn't know when it might work again. Maintenance personnel are repairing it "with a chewing gum," one doctor remarked sarcastically.

The Chepo regional hospital has had problems since it was built in 1977. The structure itself is damaged and the furniture inside is in deplorable condition. Wheelchairs, stretchers and various apparatuses for delivering food lie abandoned in the corridors.

Cooks say the state of deterioration of the kitchen "puts patients' health at risk."

Sources at the CSS say they are trying to raise $13.1 million to rehabilitate the hospital, including constructing a water plant treatment.