By The Star Staff
“At long last, The Trauma Center will be a reality in our City of Mayagüez,” former senator Evelyn Vázquez Nieves said Tuesday in a press release.
“Yesterday we had the opportunity to meet with Health Secretary Dr. Carlos Mellado, with whom we discussed the most important issues regarding the Mayagüez Medical Center,” said the former New Progressive Party (NPP) senator for the Mayagüez-Aguadilla District who who aspires to become, in November, the first woman mayor of the so-called “Sultana of the West.” “He agreed, at our request, to include Mayagüez Medical Center in the new network of Mayagüez Trauma Centers in Puerto Rico.”
“We thank the Secretary of the Department of Health for agreeing to make Mayagüez one of the most important cities in the country,” Vázquez Nieves said of the trauma centers identified as a priority. “It tells us that thanks to our legislation as a senator, we will be protecting Mayagüez doctors from the so-called ‘bad practice’ and establishing the boarding schools to create more specialists. … It will be much easier to process!”
“The reality has been that the Mayagüez Medical Center has had all the necessary resources to crystallize into adequate facilities, in effect, for what has been so long awaited for so many decades,” she said. “We’re going to turn Mayagüez Medical Center into a Trauma Center.”
“There is already money allocated for this purpose,” Vázquez Nieves noted. “You have to pay close attention to the conditions in which the Heliport is located, enable from six to 10 rooms to deal with the various cases of trauma and to purchase a set of equipment to carry out specialized studies, among other things.”
She said that soon “we will also be meeting with Dr. Pablo Rodríguez, former medical director of the Puerto Rico Trauma Center, who helped make all the legislation to temper the conditions of the Mayagüez Medical Center and finally turn it into a Trauma Center.”
The mayoral candidate said it has been clearly established that the current municipal administration of Mayagüez has been totally insensitive to pain, while parties and festivals have been more important than the suffering and need of the people,”
“A town without health and quality of life, is a people without happiness,” she said.