Medical Equipment Gift to Aid Ill Mexican Newborns

It was the perfect marriage.

A Tijuana hospital had the expertise, but not the equipment, to take care of critically ill, premature newborns. San Diego County faced a burgeoning bill for treating such babies whose Mexican mothers had crossed to American soil to give birth.

These complementary interests were joined at the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday, in a novel effort to cut the county’s costs for caring for those babies as well as to give Baja California a place to care for the children.

In a union arranged by San Diego County’s Department of Transborder Affairs, a trailer loaded with more than $65,000 in used medical equipment donated by an Orange County hospital arrived at Issste-Cali Hospital in Tijuana.

The incubators, breathing machines and other equipment will allow the hospital to care for up to six critically ill newborns at a time, said Dr. Gonzalo Jimenez, director general of the hospital.

Officials say the move could save San Diego County many thousands of dollars every year, because it will allow the sick newborns of indigent Mexican residents to be transferred to Issste-Cali after their condition is stabilized.

Caring for eight such children in San Diego neonatal intensive care units cost the county $800,000 in 1986, part of a $41-million bill for caring for indigents.

The arrangement will benefit everyone, said Dr. Tomas F. Gonda, medical director for the county’s transborder department.

“We get a benefit in terms of the fact that those babies who are residents of Mexico--and I’m not talking about undocumented, I’m talking about residents who come and deliver here--those babies we will be able to transfer at a much earlier stage than had been happening until now,” Gonda said.

“The second benefit would be for the Tijuana community, who would then be having an upgraded level of care for the high-risk infants down there. Thirdly, it will benefit the relations between the two communities and two countries. So everybody benefits all around, in the end,” Gonda said.

Dr. Gabriel Chong, medical director the Tijuana hospital, agreed. He noted that the equipment will give the hospital the only neonatal intensive care unit to serve the more than 2 million residents of Baja California.

“This will improve the quality of care at our hospital not only for the preemie babies of our members, but for the premature babies of all kinds of people,” Chong said.

The hospital is set up for government workers, but it cares for indigent children regularly, Chong said. Furthermore, San Diego County insisted as a condition of the donation that all babies be eligible for care there.

The equipment was donated by Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, after a pediatrician there, Dr. Dennis Phillips, learned of the need from San Diego officials.

Phillips towed the equipment--all of which had been used at the hospital--in a rented trailer to Tijuana Thursday.

“We’re happy to be able to help,” Phillips said. “We certainly see this as not just a one-time effort but as allowing both sides of the border to benefit.”

Gonda said he continues working on similar efforts to cut the county’s indigent health care bill, but he would not be specific.

He added, however, that he hopes the arrangement will serve as a model all along the U.S.-Mexico border of how a wealthier U.S. community can ease its cost of caring for indigent Mexicans while improving health care across the border.