With the NHS under increasing pressure,the riveting Midnight Familyshows us a dramatically different perspective by transporting us to Mexico City’s deeply unequal healthcare system. Read on for five numbers about healthcare in the Mexican capital that act as timely reminders of the importance of public healthcare, and don’t miss this exhilarating doc in cinemas & on demand from 21 February.
This is the number of public ambulances operating in Mexico City for a population of 9 million people. In comparison, with a similar population (8.9 million people), London has 1,100 public ambulances. This lack of ambulances in Mexico City has spawned an underground industry of for-profit ambulances, which are often run by people with little or no training or certification (source: London Assembly).
For patients undergoing cardiac arrest every minute delay reduces survival by 10% - one of the reasons why cutting ambulance waiting times is of vital importance (source: BBC).
While the average emergency response time in the UK is increasing, it is still down to 7 minutes for urban areas and 11 minutes for rural areas. In Mexico City, this figure is 5 times higher - 35 minutes. (source: Mexico News Daily).
There are 2,988 private healthcare institution in Mexico, accounting for two third of all hospitals - meaning there are 28.6 private facilities per 1 million inhabitants (source: OECD).
The Mexican Red Cross has more than 42,000 volunteers and 12,000 paramedics working in around the country. On average, they provide more than 1.3 million people with emergency ambulance services, free of cost, every year. This equates to Mexican Red Cross responding to eight out of ten ambulance calls (source: International Federation of Red Cross).
In contrast, the Ochoa family’s ambulance is one of about 80 private ambulance teams. Most of these ‘pirate crews’ emerged from a spontaneous mass rescue effort that followed the Mexico City’s massive 1985 earthquake that claimed approximately 10,000 lives (source: The Globe and Mail).
