Government of Bolivia creates by supreme decree the Bicentennial Gastroenterological Institute, Fourth Level Hospital

This is an automated translation of the original release published in Spanish.

Statement from the Ministry of Health of Bolivia

At a Ministerial Cabinet meeting, the national government approved the Supreme Decree creating the Bicentennial Gastroenterological Institute, Fourth Level Hospital, located in the city of La Paz, which will enter the pre-operation phase in August.

“We already have the infrastructure, the equipment is there, we needed one more phase of the gas task, which the company is solving these weeks, but we needed the birth document of the Gastroenterological Hospital to be able to form the management team. Within the framework of Law 738, we have to move forward with this important infrastructure,” said the Minister of Health and Sports, Maria Renée Castro, at a press conference.

She highlighted that it is the first Fourth Level Hospital in the country, which has a high technological and resolution level with specialized care and research services in the field of gastroenterology.

“We are going to immediately begin the pre-operation phase, as our President announced in the honorary session. We would be starting this phase immediately in the month of August, which refers to everything technical and regulatory, we are shortening certain deadlines established in the contract to be able to advance in the implementation of this important infrastructure and that will benefit not only the department of La Paz, but of the entire country,” Minister Castro emphasized.

The Gastroenterological Institute is located on Avenida Zabaleta in the city of La Paz. For this great project, the national government is investing more than 739 million bolívares from the State coffers.

For its full operation phase, it will have five integrated operating rooms, 15 consulting rooms, a functional testing laboratory, four adult endoscopy rooms and two pediatric endoscopy rooms. Likewise, it will serve various subspecialties, of which the following stand out: abdominal surgery, coloproctology, gastroenterology (adult and pediatric), hepatology and the transplant unit, among others. In this way, it will become the reference center for research on gastroenterological pathologies in the country.

“This Supreme Decree is creating our Bicentennial Gastroenterological Institute, Fourth Level Hospital, which will also have a decentralized nature in order to facilitate and make all processes within the hospital much more dynamic for the acquisition of supplies, reagents and so on. “We are doing everything to carry out this work as soon as possible,” said the Minister of Health and Sports.