Don't Get Sick in Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico Healthcare System Does Not Seem to Care About Patients

Puerto Rico is a beautiful island and a magnificent place to live. That is, until you get sick, or at least until you need to visit a doctor.

And it is not because Puerto Rico has no good doctors or lacks of them. It is just that they don't seem to care about the patient time, as if it was not valuable at all.

Anybody in Puerto Rico knows that visiting a doctor is a task that will take from a couple of hours up to a full day. And this is for a scheduled appointment.

The typical Puerto Rican doctor would not give fixed appointment to its patients. Rather, their secretary would tell you to come at a given time and then patients are accepted by the old "first-come, first-serve" method.

Once I had to visit a doctor for a routine check. Called his number, was told I should come on a Tuesday 8:00 am, and that all patients were being cited at that time, then the doctor would see them in the order they arrived.

I arrived to the doctor's office at 7.45 am, and was disappointed to notice I was number eight in line. At that point, I thought I would be there until 10.00 am or so. I just couldn't understand why wasn't it possible for the doctor to give appointments to each of us every fifteen minutes. I mean, it was obvious that he couldn't see eight patients at a time, so in that way we shouldn't be wasting our time.

Well, not only did he not do that, but worse, time passed by, it was 10.00 am and still no news from the doctor. And of course, we were left to stand on the hallway. Did it matter we had jobs? Not to our beloved doctor.

I was about to leave when someone at the line said "same old thing, yesterday he came in at 10.30 am", so I stayed. And there he came, calm as if it were dawn. As if he was doing as a favor, or was such an eminence...

You can bet I asked him, after he finished checking me (of course), why he would do such thing. First, he tried to lie saying his daughter had a car accident. I asked her if she had had another one the day before... he did not answer just looked downed, maybe thinking on his Hippocratic Oath.