From the Archives: Anthropological studies show the potential impact of community care and creative policies in improving health care in Puerto Rico.
“Doctors don’t know what it’s like for the regular people with diabetes,” Carmen told me at a diabetes clinic in Puerto Rico. “We have to take medications at the same time every day, change our diets, sleep and exercise more, and come here a lot. It gets very overwhelming very quickly.”
Under the shadow of Puerto Rico’s ongoing economic crisis and the privatization of the health care sector, the Puerto Rican medical system is falling apart. By 2019, 15 percent of biomedical professionals had permanently left Puerto Rico for employment in the U.S., leaving just over 10,000 professionals to serve a population of over 3 million people.
“We see how confused and alone the patients are when they’re first diagnosed, especially in dealing with the insurance nightmare. We try to guide them through it, but things change so often that even our billing person has trouble keeping up with it. We end up continuing with our jobs because it’s the only thing we have the energy and knowledge to do.”
It is clear that such services do a good job in representing good clinical and research practice in community settings, particularly in rural areas that do not have consistent or easy access to health care centers. Such programs need and deserve more funding.
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