The disaster of Garrahan Hospital It was brewing almost from the very beginning of the government headed by Javier Milei. And it is nothing more than the symbol of the advanced of the current national administration against public health. Between December 2023 and May 2025, more than 200 professionals renounced in La Garrahan, a figure that includes at least 50 plant doctors already 20 residents. Meanwhile, the consultations during the same period exceeded 600,000, 40 percent of which corresponded to oncological treatments.
A Garrahan resident charges a monthly salary of 797,000 pesos, although he works between 60 and 70 hours per week, including six monthly guards, between daily and weekends.
In addition, there are the fellows, who add more than 200 professionals, from biochemists to biotechnologists and doctors who work eight hours a day together with plant doctors, with up to eight guards, and do research. “We assume critical functions but we are not recognized as hospital members,” he said Victoria González, Pediatrician who went to deputies to inform about the situation. We do not receive the last increase of 15 percent granted to staff. Our salary, which is considered a stipend, suffered a 50 percent loss in the last year and we have no labor rights. Approximately 10 percent of the total fellows resigned. I brought my salary receipt, although I am ashamed that a professional who formed for 15 years has to show what he charges. ”The fees vary, but, for example, a pediatrician received who attends complex patients, and who sometimes in a guard receives children at the edge of death, charges 6,600 pesos per hour.
Swell. As a high complexity pediatric center, reference from Argentina and Latin America, at the end of 2023 it had an operational deficit of 31,000 million pesos. When the salary increases were losing strength to inflation, in August and September 2024 the protests and measures of the Garrahan health workers began.
The former Board of Directors of the Hospital decided to grant a bonus of 500,000 pesos to alleviate, for one time, that gap that began to be aggregate. But the newly assumed Minister of Health of the Nation, Mario Lugonesdecided to displace the five members of the body responsible for administering the hospital due to the delivery of that bonus.
From that breakdown the situation did not cease to get worse. The salaries did not increase, Lugones implemented a series of administrative cuts and new measures that increased the turnover of the claw, but not a salary recovery of doctors and workers in general. The emptying of drip professionals began: every month, little by little, doctors renounced.
From the Ministry of Health, a plan to “improve the billing” of the institution was announced, offering modules to be charged to the private sector, among other actions. And “the decision not to incorporate new positions.” The countercara: vacancies that were left without covering and labor overload over those who continued working in the hospital, including the quasi closure of vital areas for patients, who reach the claw from all over the country, and even other neighboring nations.
The Ministry of Health announced in January this year that the hospital had reached financial balance. In January, the national agency argued to have implemented “a strategy aimed at increasing collections for benefits that has begun to give results: reservations of approximately 2,000 million pesos per month were consolidated, which guaranteed compliance with payment obligations.” Nothing was said about the salaries of plant doctors, residents, nurses, technicians and other hospital workers. Nor of vacancies and professional emptying.
After announcing a salary increase that would carry the salary of residents to 1,300,000 through the implementation of a bonus (although at the end of this edition there had been no official meetings that formalized it), in the same statement it is affirmed that “many public hospitals – including the claw – were used as a militancy platform”, and even the residents were threatened with immediate dismissals.
The doctors gave up the force measures that were going to continue on Thursday 6 with a strike – at which the rest of the staff did fold – after a sail march and to join the demonstration of retirees on Wednesdays.
The Association of Professionals and Technicians of the Garrahan Hospital He spoke against the announcement of the Ministry of Health. In a statement, they repudiated “the violent and persecutory terms” of the message. “We request that they end the defamations and maneuvers that try to distort the nature of the claim,” they expressed. “We will not accept any kind of political persecution.” And they began a strike from Wednesday 4 to Friday 6th. ATE declared a day of health struggle throughout the country for Thursday, denouncing the lack of concrete responses. Public health in intensive care.
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