How It Works

ceSo I have finally figured out how the whole clinic thing works. It´s only taken me 7 weeks of learning Spanish to understand everything.
Honduras is broken into departments the same way Canada has provinces. Each department has communities like our cities, and within each community is another suburb like Ross Glen in Medicine Hat, or Wildwood in Calgary or Glen Lake in KW. I can´t remember what department I live in, but I live in the village of El Guante in the community of Cedros in the suburb of Arriba (which means "up" in Spanish). Each community, in my case Cedros, has medical clinics (well most of them, not all) which are sponsored by some American NGOs. In our case, a lot of the help and finance is brought to us by Feed The Children and some other church based groups. I really should learn all the names of everything, but whatever...
So, every house in each village has a number, the same way we do on our address. The family that lives in that house gets the same file number as their house number. The head of the family gets #1 and the rest of his family get the sequential #s. So in my case in Alberta, my house number is 61 so Dad would be 61-1 and I would be 61-2. As long as your family lives with you or you are a dependant of the family, you share the number. If you have your own house, you get your own number. Hope that made sense. Its 34C here with 85% humidity and no AC so my brain is a bit fried. Anyway, as long as you are a member of a family and you live in Cedros, you get access to the clinic. Last year the policy was changed, but it used to be that each person paid 100lps (Lempiras) per year and you can see the doctor as many times as you like. The problem was that some people were abusing the system and came to see the doctor every time they sneezed while others only saw the doctor once or twice a year and weren´t really getting their money´s worth. So now, every visit costs 15Lps (which is like 93cents Canadian) and they get all their prescriptions for free, all except for Depo Provera bc shot which is 5Lps or 34 cents or the pill which is 15Lps or 93 cents. God, how we would love for bc to be that cheap in Canada. All procedures are free, stitches and births and tests and all that. Anything that cant be dealt with in the clinic gets done in the hospital in Tegucigalpa. I believe that is free as well.
We have a dentist here and a pharmacist and I was wrong about the nurses and support staff. I thought that the nurses didn´t have formal training or education but they do. The cool thing is, if someone thinks they would like to be a nurse or a doctor, they can come work in a clinic and learn stuff for a month to 6 weeks (paid) to decide if they want to pursue schooling. What a fantastic idea. It would have saved me lots of time and money on wasted school if I could have tried on some jobs first.
I think I mentioned before that vaccinations are mandatory here for all children. They are free as well. If the clinic or the health section of the government find out that the child is not vaccinated, the parents can be fined and/or jailed and the child removed and vaccinated anyway.
So might as well just get them vaccinated since its free.
If you are not a part of the community, you can still come to the clinic, it will just cost you 75lps. So for instance, if you are visiting family and get sick, you can come to the clinic but it will cost you. As opposed to in Canada where health care is provincial but also federal in that I can see my Ontario doctor with my Alberta Health care card.
So that´s basically how it works. I have many stories of things I have seen and experienced here, some that have freaked me out. But I will save those for another time
Hugs n stuff.