The Mexican Government will hire 1,200 additional Cuban doctors to add to the hundreds who are already in our country, after a meeting between the director of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), Zoé Robledo, and the president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Although the meeting took place on Friday, May 10th, in Havana, the IMSS specified days later the number of Cuban specialists, who will join the 768 who already work in Mexico’s public health sector and 123 who will arrive in the coming days with a specialty in family medicine.
The island’s health workers will join the IMSS-Bienestar, a system created by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to serve people without social security and which replaced Seguro Popular, with the same purpose.
At that meeting, the general director of the Mexican Institute of Social Security indicated that through the agreement between the governments of Mexico and Cuba, it is intended to expand to 1,200 Cuban doctors who support the IMSS-Bienestar medical units located in remote and difficult-to-access areas. ”, detailed the institute.
Opposition candidate criticizes the hiring of doctors from Cuba
The hiring of Cuban doctors in Mexico has sparked criticism from the opposition. The presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, has promised that her government would not hire these workers.
We are not going to continue bringing Cuban doctors to Mexico! In Mexico, we have enough capacity and talent, and the bringing of Cuban doctors has only served to simulate the financing of an authoritarian regime because they don’t get paid, instead, all the money goes to the communist party in Cuba” she explained during the presentation of her health plan last Monday, May 6th.
But the Government justifies the hiring because Mexico has 2.4 doctors per one thousand inhabitants, higher than the average of 2 per one thousand in Latin America, but lower than the average of 3.5 of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
Furthermore, the López Obrador administration has defended the arrival of Cuban doctors after stating that Mexican doctors do not want to work in rural or marginalized areas. At the same time, national health personnel have responded that there are areas in which they cannot work due to the cartel violence.
The participation of Cuban doctors in IMSS-Bienestar has added to the work of Mexican doctors to strengthen the First Level of Care by increasing productivity in consultations and the operating room,” the institute’s statement concluded.
TYT Newsroom
