“It’s not about closing them”: AMLO contradicted López-Gatell about pharmacy offices

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), assured that his government does not seek to eliminate the country’s pharmaceutical clinics but aims to comply with the “improvement of the health system.”

“It is not about closing the pharmacy offices; it is about improving the public health system. The pharmacies exist and can induce you to buy medicines there because you also need medical attention. It’s not canceling anything,” he said at the morning conference.

With this, the president contradicted the statements of the Undersecretary for Prevention and Health Promotion, Hugo López-Gatell, about the inefficiency of these clinics in treating chronic diseases, which is why “they will not exist.”

“In that sense, the clinics attached or annexed to the pharmacy today cover a need, but unfortunately in very precarious conditions, precarious for the population that is served, precarious for the workers, doctors, and doctors who work there and, on the other hand, very lucrative for those corporations. But we cannot cancel them outright. I would prefer that they did not exist ”, he has commented.

Pharmacy Association responded to López-Gatell

Faced with these statements, the president of the National Association of Pharmacies of Mexico (Anafarmex), Antonio Pascual Feria, spoke about it, saying that these clinics emerged two decades ago, as in other countries, to “attend minor evils” on all for the population without social security.

In this sense, he considered it unfeasible to try to disappear the nearly 18,000 Clinics Adjacent to Pharmacies (CAF), which grant more than 350,000 consultations daily, when there is no universal guarantee of medical care for the entire population; or because there is a population that “does not want to wait in long lines” in one of the medical units of its affiliation for having a “minor illness.”

“Currently, there is no universal guarantee of care for the entire population […] They have been so successful because of the proximity they have to the communities because they reduce times when it comes to minor illnesses, and they don’t spend hours in waiting rooms.”

In addition, Pascual Feria assured us that they are all certified general practitioners from the public sector who take advantage of their free time to earn extra income.

Pharmaceutical clinics at the forefront of the pandemic

Pascual recalled that during the most contagious stages of the pandemic, in which there was hospital saturation, in the network of pharmacies attached to Anafarmex, a protocol was applied in which, in the event of suspicion or pre-diagnosis of covid, the patient had to be channeled to accredited private or public medical institutions.