Salud and Cuba

Yesterday (Tuesday) we watched an incredibly interesting movie about the doctors of Cuba called Salud (Health). The film documented the efforts of Cuban doctors to travel to places in need of physicians, such as South Africa, Venezuela, and Honduras, to provide preventative and family medicine, especially in rural communities. Although Cuba gets a bad rep for its political ideology, its health care system is entirely free and accessible. There is 1 physician for every 250 people. The physicians live in the communities they serve and are accessible at all hours of the day. Their biggest limitation is access to certain medications made exclusively in the United States. They need to buy these drugs from another country, who bought them from the US at a high expense or find an alternative. However, for some conditions, the US is the only supplier and the Ministry of Health has to make some arrangements.

One of my favorite things about the movie is it shows the generosity of Cuban doctor force. Doctors live in under-resourced communities around the world to provide care to those people. They are able to use their health model to help developing nations create a similar sustainable model. For example, the Gambia in western Africa has worked closely with Cuba to develop a community-based health system with doctors living in each community. There is also a movement in many countries to build medical schools in these underserved areas so that health care is accessible to these people.

Another great asset of the Cuban health system is their medical school, ELAM. They provide free medical education to students from any nation to can prove a need or inaccessibility to medical education in their own country and a commitment to return to their countries to provide care. There are some students from the US who are studying here and learning the preventative care philosophy and health care (all in Spanish, too).

After the film, we discussed our likes and dislikes as usual. For the majority, we expressed the desire to bring universal access to healthcare in the States. However, we all agreed, the business of medicine and politics gets in the way. Many of us have worked in public hospitals and clinics in the US and see the need for more community-based health and less expensive services. In the US and other countries around the world, people die daily because they cannot receive services in time or the services are financially inaccessible.