X-Ray has been in the UBS corridor in Butantã for over a year – 03/30/2023 – Health

Housewife Renata Passos, 45, went about two months ago with her mother, 69 years old, to Ambulatory Medical Assistance (AMA)/Basic Health Unit (UBS) Jardim São Jorge, in the Butantã region, west of São Paulo, when the elderly woman fractured one of her fingers.

At the health center, the doctor asked for an X-ray, which was only taken at the Municipal Emergency Room in Lapa (also in the west zone), about 15 km away and more than an hour away by bus.

The inconvenience could have been avoided if the X-ray machine at the Butantã unit had been installed. According to users, the equipment, brand new and which cost BRL 201,390, according to the City of São Paulo, has been sealed in wooden boxes in a corridor for over a year and has never been installed.

Questioned, the Municipal Health Department did not say how long the device has been in the hallway. But he said that it will be installed after the renovation and adaptation of the X-ray room, with delivery expected next month. “An autoclave and dental X-ray will also be installed during the period”. says the folder, in a note.

Public health service patients filmed the equipment in the hallway. According to videos taken by cell phone, there are at least three boxes on site, which are accessed by users when they need to take tests – there is even a chair for waiting.

Two of them are covered in black plastic, one of which has bricks on top. Next to the boxes there are carts with cleaning products.

The videos sent by the report show the closed X-ray room with a table in front. The corridor, covered, is between the AMA and UBS in Butantã, which serve an average of 220,000 people per month, according to the secretariat.

“They never know when the X-ray will start working”, complains Passos, who, before being able to be seen in Lapa, passed by AMA/UBS Jardim Paulo 6º, 2 km away, but the device was broken. “Meanwhile, he [equipamento de radiografia] it’s boxed in there.”

Management Ricardo Nunes (MDB) advises patients to seek the Municipal Emergency Room Doctor Caetano Virgílio Neto, in Butantã itself, but according to the housewife, the wait there exceeds four hours.

Passos claims to have already witnessed an employee at the station ask a person to get off one of the boxes, where he had sat to wait for the blood collection to be carried out.

According to the city hall, another option for people in the region who need to take an X-ray is to look for the AMA Jardim Peri-Peri, where a 73-year-old retiree who was heard by the report went, but who asked not to have her name disclosed. The problem, she says, is that the x-ray took more than a week to perform. By the time she was attended to, the cough that had brought her to the Jardim São Jorge health center had passed.

Community leader Cláudio Torres, who was part of the unit’s management council, says that the device was delivered about a year and a half ago. “It’s absurd for expensive equipment to be lying in a hallway and nobody does anything,” he says.

Torres recalls that users of the health unit signed a petition about two years ago, asking for the unit to be renovated and a room to be built for X-rays, which arrived about six months later. According to the community leader, there is also a sterilizing device on site that has never been installed. Questioned, the Nunes management did not respond about this equipment or about the broken X-ray at AMA/UBS Paulo 6º.

In a note, management Ricardo Nunes (MDB) states that maintenance was carried out on the air conditioning in the X-ray room at AMA/UBS Paulo 6º for the operation of the radiography equipment.