In 2023, around 32,000 people in Chile died while on the waiting list. According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health, until December of last year, non-GES waiting services exceeded 2.7 million, of which 10% correspond to surgeries and the remaining 90% to new specialty consultations. And in the case of GES pathologies, the delayed guarantees reach 4.5 million.
This reality, which became more acute during the pandemic, is a public health concern. A need that, in October 2022, plastic surgeon Jaime Arriagada, a full member of the Chilean Society of Plastic Surgery (SCCP), with more than 50 years of experience, proposed to collaborate in solving, starting at Cesfam in the commune of Santo Domingo, in the Valparaíso Region, a voluntary operation that once a month would provide free care to patients on waiting lists for non-GES care.
Since then, traumatologists, neurologists, urologists, cardiologists, plastic surgeons, among other specialists, help the residents of that commune to be treated in a timely manner, to permanently solve their health problem.
On Saturday, April 13, the last medical operation was carried out that included minor surgeries, such as cysts, lipomas, moles, among others, in which the president of the SCCP, Dr. Susana Benítez, and two SCCP scholarship recipients participated. , who together with two surgeons from the San Antonio Hospital, performed 12 surgeries in one day.
After a year and a half of uninterrupted activity, With the help of 16 doctors from 12 specialties, they have managed to treat 1,350 patients with non-GES pathologies, from a waiting list of approximately 3,000 patients.
Dr. Jaime Arriagada points out that at the end of the pandemic he thought about how he could contribute to solving the growing waiting lists. “I went to talk to the director at the office, and the mayor was there at that minute, and he told me that the biggest problem was the waiting list for specialties that they didn’t have, and I told them that I could help them,” he says about the process. which began with the help of a cardiologist, a urologist and a nephrologist internist, at Cesfam in Santo Domingo, to which more and more were joining, and which today already has more than 16 specialist doctors.
“We have made contact with the San Antonio Hospital, which is very open to collaboration and in the last operation two surgeons came to collaborate with us, because The idea is that it not only serves one commune, but that it can also serve larger communes. like San Antonio,” he explains about the operation.
The mayor of Santo Domingo, Dino Lotito, has expressed the community’s gratitude for the work carried out by this group of volunteer doctors: “We are very happy, because we know that
An early diagnosis of pathologies is the possibility of carrying out treatments and avoiding complications in the future.”
For all the specialists who are part of this initiative, Dr. Arriagada indicates that returning to public service and providing free care is very gratifying. “There are people who wait 400 to 500 days for care to remove a mole or a cyst, something that should be resolved in days. In the check-ups of the patients we operated on in the last operation, everyone was grateful that something they had been dealing with for so long had been resolved,” he highlights.
After 19 months of operations, Dr. Arriagada highlights the importance of addressing the problem of waiting lists and its possible solutions, which can also be replicated by groups of specialists grouped in scientific societies, private clinics, medical schools with their teachers and scholarship holders, in other Cesfams in the country. “We cannot lose hope in finding a solution to this serious problem. Hopefully the solidarity of other groups will be awakened to copy this initiative,” he concludes.
