After a delay of more than a year, the first stage of the Hospital Infantil Mi Gran Esperanza, Mexico’s first specialist hospital for children with cancer, will open its doors in Tlajomulco next month.
The three-story, 16,000- square-meter hospital will contain comparable facilities to a top-level institution in the United States. When all three stages are completed by April 2018, the facility will be able to attend up to 3,000 patients a year.
The hospital is costing $US60 million to build and is funded entirely by private donations. The land was donated by the Jalisco state government to Mi Gran Esperanza, a registered charity in Jalisco that has been helping children with cancer for 19 years.
An agreement has been reached with Mexico’s Seguro Popular health insurance program for initial funding of patients’ treatment to the tune of around 20 million pesos.
Despite this, children will be admitted as determined by their medical needs and not the economic status of their families, the hospital’s directors say.
The hospital houses 36 private rooms, nine areas for chemotherapy, two operating theaters, a pharmacy and a chapel.
Childhood cancer is the second leading cause of death among children and adolescents in Mexico aged under 15. A child dies from cancer every four hours, it is estimated.
Some 8,000 new cases of cancer in children are diagnosed each year in Mexico.
The new hospital will include a research department and is looking to sign collaboration agreements with similar hospitals in other countries.
The telephone number of the new hospital is (33) 3121-0572.