Paraguay
Velázquez asked Fretes to review warehouses and guarantee access to medicines
The senator called on the new health minister to personally inspect health warehouses and investigate expired medicines. He also warned that the crisis will not be solved with more funding alone, but with changes in procurement and distribution.
Senator Rubén Velázquez asked the new Minister of Public Health, Isaías Fretes, to make one of his first measures a tour of the ministry’s warehouses and health depots to verify the situation of medicines and medical supplies.
According to ABC Color, during an intervention in the Senate the lawmaker praised Fretes’ arrival at the ministry and said that the oversight work he carried out when he was at the head of the Social Security Institute should now be extended to hospitals and storage centers in the public system.
Velázquez proposed that the minister personally verify the available stock and determine which medicines are actually missing in hospitals. He also asked that the existence of expired products in warehouses be investigated and that responsibility be established for donated medicines that, he said, were not distributed in time.
According to ABC Color, the senator placed special emphasis on drugs for cancer patients and questioned whether supplies could be stored while people undergoing complex treatments face difficulties accessing them.
The lawmaker said the health crisis does not depend solely on the level of the budget, but also on the way the state buys, manages and distributes medicines. In that context, he called for an end to improvisation and for planning that would make it possible to define which supplies are essential, how many patients need them and how to ensure they arrive on time and in full.
Velázquez said the delays especially affect patients with cancer, rare diseases, autoimmune conditions, transplant recipients, people with hemophilia and kidney diseases. He also questioned the fact that many patients must buy medicines and supplies on their own and that families have to resort to fundraising drives, donations, loans or selling assets to sustain treatments.
He also highlighted the agreement reached with the medical union and said the salary increase can help ease the crisis, although he stressed that it is not enough to solve the system’s structural problems. In that line, he valued the priorities announced by Fretes upon taking office — timely access, quality, transparency and dialogue with professionals — but said they will have to be translated into concrete measures.
For Velázquez, the ultimate goal is for the health system to prevent patients and their families from falling into poverty in order to receive care.
Sources
About this note. Written by El Notero with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on what was published by the cited outlet. El Notero did not do its own reporting on this event.
