Health care in Colombia
[2] When looking at the right to health with respect to children, Colombia achieves 96.3% of what is expected based on its current income.
[3] In regards to the right to health amongst the adult population, the country achieves only 91.7% of what is expected based on the nation's level of income.
Malaria affects nearly 85% of the national territory, mainly the Pacific Ocean coast, the Amazon jungle and eastern savannas, with an estimated of 250,000 cases/year and a mortality rate of 3/100,000.
[11] The first graduated medical doctor, Alvaro de Aunón came to New Granada from Seville, Spain, in 1597 and stayed for a short time.
[12] In 1636, Rodrigo Enriquez de Andrade started the first faculty of medicine in the New Granada, at St Bartholomew's College with little success because of the prejudices against the medical career in the Spanish culture, where it was considered vulgar and proper of lower-class people.
The medical care at the time was made almost exclusively in the particular homes of the sick people due lo the lack of health institutions.
In 1739 the Hospital San Juan de Dios, Bogota was opened,[14] built by fray Pedro Pablo Villamor.
In 1925, Paulina Beregoff became the first woman to become a Doctor of Medicine from a Colombian institution, the Russian-American graduated from the University of Cartagena.
A 1993 reform transformed the structure of public health care funding by shifting the burden of subsidy from providers to users.
On January 10, 1985, Dr. Elkin Lucena performed the first successful in vitro fertilization, that allowed the birth of the first Latin American test tube baby Carolina Mendez.
[16] On May 20, 1994, Dr. Manuel Elkin Patarroyo received the Prince of Asturias Awards by his technical and scientific research in the development of synthetic malaria vaccine.
At the bottom of the scale—in terms of quality and coverage—were the rural areas in the non-Andean regions as well as the marginal neighborhoods in medium-sized and small cities.
Estimates of the number of people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), adults and children (0–49 years of age), in 2005 ranged from 160,000 to 310,000.
Services provided by the new Multisectoral National Plan, launched in July 2004, include integrated care for people living with HIV and provision of antiretroviral drugs.
The fraudulent expedition of low level SISBEN ID cards is currently one of the major problems in the healthcare system.
Wrong identification of beneficiaries and political issues present a challenge to the system which is preventing people in need from receiving the subsidies and benefits designed for them.
A study conducted by América Economía magazine ranked 21 Colombian health care institutions among the top 44 in Latin America, amounting to 48 percent of the total.
