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López Obrador: "We don't have Mexican doctors, but there are about 50,000 vacancies"

2022-05-16T18:50:03.017Z


The president comes out against the controversy over the hiring of 500 Cuban doctors to work in poor and isolated areas of Mexico


A doctor measures the temperature of a child at the Heroes del 47 elementary school on Aug. 20, 2020, in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Alfredo Martinez (Getty Images)

"How nice that they ask me about the Cuban doctors, because I wanted to...".

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has ruled on the hiring of 500 doctors in Cuba to fill general positions and specialists in Mexico, because he has assured that there are about 50,000 vacancies, "but Mexican doctors do not want to attend" because they are required in distant communities and for the training they have received, he assured.

“We don't have doctors.

We do not have specialists to go to work in the poorest and most remote areas.

There are no pediatricians”, he has insisted.

The president was speaking in this way about an open controversy since his recent tour of Central America, when the medical schools of Mexico complained about the hiring of foreign specialists.

López Obrador has explained that Cubans who arrive will be paid "the same as Mexicans."

And the government will pay them.

“There is no budget problem.

There is to hire them all, that is our plan, that there is no lack of specialists or generals, and not only from Monday to Friday, on Saturdays and Sundays people also get sick.

But the president has insisted that, despite having open calls for Mexicans, they do not want to attend these areas.

"At the beginning of my government I visited the three IMSS hospitals in Yucatan, none of them had pediatricians, and they continue like this," he said.

For the president, the shortage of doctors in Mexico is due, among other things, to the quotas established in hospitals to train specialists, something that has been happening since previous governments.

Some of the Cuban doctors who will arrive, the leader has said, will go to a care center for children with disabilities that will be installed in Tlapa, in the mountains of Guerrero, "the poorest area of ​​the country."

He has referred to a previous plan to inaugurate this hospital in the mountains, which was frustrated due to the lack of Mexican specialists who wanted to live and work there.

The Guerrero mountain is not only one of the poorest places in the country, it is also one of the most dangerous due to the presence of drug traffickers and poppy plantations, among others.

Violence is common in these areas, where doctors and teachers are lacking due to fear and lack of resources to carry out their work.

López Obrador has not cited this matter,

He has harshly criticized "the elites" of medicine, who "consider that health is a privilege for those who can pay for it."

He respects this opinion, which seems to him "selfish, inhuman and retrograde", compared to his option of guaranteeing health as a right for the entire population.

But he has avoided generalizing, “when most doctors and nurses have risked their lives during the pandemic, something extraordinary”, he has stated.

In his criticism of the elites, he has again attacked the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) because, he says, instead of leaving their students to collaborate in times of pandemic, "they went home."

"That should not be done by public or private universities, but much less by UNAM."

Many resident students have been working during the pandemic, and some have lost their lives.

Criticism then arose because they did not receive the appropriate equipment to prevent contagion, something that most of the profession complained about.

Sonado was the case of Jorge Alejandro López Rivas, a trainee doctor who died of covid without his colleagues being able to revive him.

The family reported that they did not have the necessary equipment to protect themselves.

“We shouldn't have been there, but we were there because there weren't enough staff,” his companions said.

Jorge Alejandro died in the General Hospital of Ecatepec (State of Mexico).

The issue of hiring doctors abroad has been very controversial in recent days, because specialists have assured that there are enough doctors in Mexico, that many are unemployed and that about 8,000 doctors graduate from universities every year.

Those same heads of medical colleges and universities recognize that the conditions of violence in some areas of the country, such as in the mountains of Guerrero or in states of enormous insecurity, such as Tamaulipas, keep medical graduates from choosing to work there. .

And they have mentioned cases of murders of doctors or how some have been forced to assist criminals because the narco forced them to attend them, even if they did not have sufficient knowledge.

It is not the first time that Cuban doctors go to Mexico in aid tasks, and to other countries: the Cuban medical brigades have been famous for decades.

They were in Mexico during the pandemic, also with discomfort among the medical profession.

The matter has an easy transfer to the political arena.

There are those who say that behind these brigades is hiding the financing of the dictatorship or the instruction in favor of the Cuban regime.

López Obrador was asked this Monday morning about how they are going to be paid and if that money will go to the Cuban government, which could take away from the doctors part of the salary they are given in Mexico.

"We don't have to get into that.

We thank the Government and the doctors from Cuba who come to help us, they are welcome.”

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-16

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