Hospital Salvador Allende

The hospital I work and live at in Cuba is Salvador Allende, named for the well known and respected Chilean physician and politician. It has a trauma center and is the infectious disease center of Havana. It is located right in the city, in an area known as Cerro, which is well known for being one of the poor neighborhoods in Havana.

When I first moved to Cuba, I went to visit Allende and thought it was beautiful. It was my first time in an outdoor hospital where all the wards are so open and airy. I found the landscaping amazing and wonderful, as well as the lecture hall where most classes are held. I still find it amazing a beautiful with all of the wards named for famous Latin Americans and all the natural light that penetrates each patient's room. It's nice to be in a hospital that doesn't really have that hospital feel since it's set up more like a park or a strip mall than a huge dark building filled with people sick people.

An interesting story about my hospital that I'm almost sure didn't happen anywhere else in the world is the story of Dengue. So there was an unfortunate epidemic of Dengue this year in Cuba, mostly in Havana and all the cases of Dengue were directed to my hospital, Allende. Dengue is a fever illness transmitted by mosquito bite that usually just gives people a fever and lots of aches and pains, but can complicate and in rare cases cause death. The Cuban health ministry takes matters like these seriously, and does not allow people to die from a sickness that should not normally kill people. As a result, the entire hospital shut down for 2 months with a focus on preventing deaths from Dengue and reducing the number of new cases by doing door to door epidemiological education sessions with local residents on how to prevent the mosquitoes who transmit Dengue from reproducing and searching for fever cases that may not have come to the hospital yet, but were transmitting Dengue to their families and neighbors. One thing that Cuba does really well is health promotion, and we were able to participate in that first hand this year. I was one of the students responsible for 24 hour call shifts with Dengue patients. My responsibilities were to monitor patients hospitalized with "warning signs" of complications from Dengue by checking on them every 3 hours. I worked 24 hours on and 72 hours off, which was really exhausting. I found that I really don't like waking people all day and night to check on them and ask them about their symptoms mostly because sick people don't want to be bothered every 3 hours talking about their symptoms and being examined. We got through it though and were able to drastically reduce the number of new patients hospitalized with Dengue and keep the number of deaths from Dengue to a very small number. It was an experience that reinforced for me that Cuba's health care for all policy is real. It's not just a political ploy or something they say, but they really make the health of all Cubans a priority and all health care professionals will become party of a "health army" if need be to make sure unnecessary death and debilitation is prevented.