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Hospital Nacional teams up with Harvard Medical School

by Eric Jackson

At a May 11 press conference at the Hospital Nacional it was announced that the Care Group, an alliance of teaching hospitals and physicians associated with Boston's famed Harvard School of Medicine, will be establishing their first beachhead in Latin America here in Panama. In conjunction with the Hospital Nacional, the Care Group will establish an emergency care center at which doctors who teach at Harvard will offer post-doctoral education and advanced practical experience to physicians and other health care professionals from Latin America's private and public health care sectors.

According to the Hospital Nacional's director, Dr. Juan Antonio Medrano, the Care Group was looking to expand beyond the United States, and the Hospital Nacional had been sending its emergency room physicians to Beth Israel Hospital, one of six Care Group medical facilities used for Harvard instruction. Following these experiences, and a review of the various possibilities, "we were selected by them for various reasons" and an accord was signed to create the Care Group's first and only teaching hospital in Latin America. It has not been decided whether the new emergency care center will be located within the present Hospital Nacional or in a separate building ——— the hospital's present facilities are top-notch, but when the educational mission gets underway, it will attract doctors, ER nurses, paramedics and ambulance drivers from all over Latin America and the teaching needs will impose additional space requirements.

Spokesmen for the Care Group and Beth Israel Hospital said that Harvard has been contemplating an extension of its teaching hospital network into the developing world for some time, and that Latin America was the logical place to go. In turn, due to Panama's central location and it's relatively advanced health care by regional standards, this country was the logical place to go in Latin America. Once this country became the preferred site, the Hospital Nacional became a logical partner because it's one of a handful of world-class health care facilities in Panama, with one indication of its quality the fact that it has been chosen by the US Embassy here to take care of US government employees who are stationed here.

Dr. Medrano, himself a Harvard Medical School graduate, noted that this new initiative comes at a time when the Panamanian economy, including its public and private health care systems, is beset by a severe crisis. "We need to continue moving forward in these difficult times," he said, adding that once the emergency medicine teaching facility is established, other post-doctoral educational programs in such fields as diabetes treatment, neo-natal care and cardio-vascular surgery may follow. "It's a boost that Panama needs," Medrano said.