Ecuador doctors protest crisis as patients bring own meds to surgery

Healthcare workers help a woman out of an ambulance at the emergency entrance of a hospital in Quito, Ecuador, Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2020.

Dozens of doctors, nurses and patients protested Wednesday outside a hospital in Ecuador’s capital, expressing outrage at a health care system so overstretched that people undergoing surgery bring their own syringes and medication.

One big source of anger is that last week the health ministry announced an unspecified number of dismissals from the state health care system, arguing that it needed to “optimize resources” after detecting cases of suspected overstaffing.

The Ecuadoran Medical Federation, a doctors’ association, said as many as 1,200 doctors, nurses and administrative staffers were let go. The association vowed to hold nationwide protests against the health care crisis.

“We do not have what we need to work,” said Juan Barriga, head of trauma treatment at Pablo Arturo Suarez Hospital, where the rally took place.

He said there are long waiting lists for people who need emergency operations and “patients buy what they need to undergo surgery.”

Indeed, in Ecuador patients are known to bring their own medication, needles, suture thread and other equipment when they go to the hospital.

The dismissals will also affect health care at Ecuador’s violent and overcrowded prisons, where a tuberculosis outbreak has been reported.

Outside the Quito hospital, doctors in white lab coats, nurses in uniform, patients and relatives carried signs with slogans such as “there are no supplies. No medicine, the health care system is collapsing.”

Barriga said that at his hospital alone, one of the most important of the state health care system in Quito, more than 1,000 people are on a list waiting for surgery.

President Daniel Noba, a conservative in power since 2023 and staunch ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, appointed his sixth health minister on Monday.