The director of Mexico’s major health care provider, the Instituto Nacional de Seguro Social (IMSS), has announced a package of ten measures that he believes will reduce the backlog for pending surgeries by 40 percent and contribute significantly to making the institution run more efficiently and for the benefit of patients.
Mikel Arriola says another of the new strategies will be to guarantee that all patients admitted to IMSS emergency rooms are given a preliminary check by a doctor within five minutes of their arrival.
The concept of triage – the process of determining the priority of patients’ treatments based on the severity of their condition – was introduced in a pilot program at ten IMSS hospitals at the end of 2015, he says.
Redeploying surgeons to work over weekends is one of the ways that Arriola intends to reduce the backlog of operations. Some IMSS patients with certain non-life threatening conditions will see their wait times for surgery reduced from four months to around 20 days.
Assignation of beds will speed up, Arriola says. A study showed that IMSS beds lie vacant for an average of 22 hours between outgoing and incoming patients. This should be reduced to around eight hours, he said.
Other important measures include:
-Referrals by family doctors to see specialists must be expedited immediately, with the patient – in many cases – having the right to receive attention on the same day.
-Patients with many chronic conditions will be able to obtain medicines for three months instead of having to return each month to replenish their supplies.
-Facilitate attention given to patients who turn up at family clinics without an appointment after experiencing a sudden medical problem. The aim is that no one has to wait more than 30 minutes to see a doctor.
-Redesign the IMSS website so subscribers and employers can carry out most bureaucratic processes online.
Further pledges included in Arriola’s ten-point plan are the opening up 25,000 new spaces for children to enroll in IMSS kindergartens, and the construction of 40 new clinics in various parts of the country.