June 2015: after taking up the post of Director of Foreign Travel at the Social Health Insurance Institute (Seguro Social de Salud – EsSalud), I had the following experience: a patient had come back from a foreign country after spending a month there and I decided to go with him to his first check-up in Peru. The attending doctor looked at me and asked “What do you want me to do with this patient? He has had a type of treatment that we don’t use in this country and I’m not familiar with it.

Most patients requiring Unrelated Bone Marrow Transplantation – UBMT (trasplante de médula ósea no emparentado – TMO-NE) through Peru’s Social Health Insurance Institute (Seguro Social de Salud – EsSalud) are being treated for leukaemia, and the majority of these are children.

The Derrama Magisterial (DM) has begun offering a number of services in accordance with the terms of its Statutes, and one noteworthy scheme involves providing credit to member teachers at a preferential rate of interest. Such credit, along with other types of investment, helps support the organization, and contributes above all to providing pension-related benefits to member teachers and their dependents. 

The “pension benefit service” that Derrama Magisterial (DM) provides to its members must be accompanied with sufficient ongoing support, including giving information and guidance to teachers. This is the role of the pensions advisory service.

The pensions advisory service aims to promote and raise awareness about the social security system among members through constant outreach, thus forging close and lasting links.

The Social Health Insurance Institute (Seguro Social de Salud – EsSalud) consists of 10,978,635 members (one third of the Peruvian population), 30 highly and medium specialized assistance networks, various specialized institutions and others. With an annual budget of 411,401,032.93 US Dollars (USD), it carries out 28,079,260 hospital interventions annually.

Article 10 of the Constitution of Peru acknowledges and entitles the progressive and universal right of every person to social security. Within this scope, the Act Nº 26790 Modernizing Social Security for Health was enacted, based on the constitutional principles that acknowledge the right to welfare and entitles people to the free access to the services provided by public, private or mixed entities.

On December 2012, a total of 32,103 covered patients had been waiting for 432 days (on average) to undergo a surgical procedure, which translated into 50 per cent of dissatisfaction and reliability loss that showed up in several surveys.

Therefore, the top management established - as an institutional policy - a new model called Trust-Building Plan: More Surgeries, Less Waiting, which turns the waiting into a new opportunity to get back the trust of covered patients and associates, and to increase user's satisfaction.

• Recruitment of Human Resources in the Social Health Insurance Institute (Seguro Social de Salud (EsSalud) was carried out through the reception of documents that were delivered physically in the same Assistance Network (or Hospital), producing an applicant participation lower than expected (mainly in positions for specialty physicians in more remote areas of the country), shortage in Human Resources, and complaints from citizens through the country.

Nursing care focuses on providing timely, ongoing, efficient, and human care directed towards the service provider and the user's satisfaction, contributing to the quality of care services in The National Cardiovascular Institute (Instituto Nacional Cardiovascular (INCOR)), EsSalud.