Fragmento

The original scope of this piece is “Development and Advance in the Field of Neuroradiology in South East Asia”- which seemed too broad a topic to cover given the differences in health care systems and uneven spread of resources within this geographical region. Hence, we’ve decided to write from the perspective of our respective practices in the Philippines and India. In these two places, availability of top of the line technology and notable expertise are not in question. However, in the Philippine setting, economics plays a big factor as socialized health care is available to a bare minimum – actually, more bare than minimum. It is thus more of a question of accessibility to rather than availability of resources. The Philippine premiere national tertiary referral centre operat es a 1500 bed on a budget less than a small district hospital in the USA. The vast majority of patients seen here are the poorest of the poor, unable to afford US$0.15 cents to purchase their permanent recordid. These people are cared for by providing ut most cost-cutting schemes, to the point of skipping confir matory diagnostics to make way for administration of essential therapeutics which of ten have to come from the pockets of the doctors directly in charge of them. In this set up, clinicians in this environment tend to have very sharp diagnostic acuity. In many instances, this was proven when the same doctors went for further studies in first world institutions and compared their pure clinical diagnosis to the one made after the usual full baseline work up. In this regard, the state university has put more effort into the field of biomedical engineering where applications in medicine are home grown to cut costs as well as customize applications for Filipinos.

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2007-10-19   |   1,147 visitas   |   Evalua este artículo 0 valoraciones

Vol. 38 Núm.1. Octubre 2007 Pags. 52-55 Rev Soc Med Quir Hosp Emerg Perez de Leon 2007; 38(Supl. 1)