LatAm Hospitals Show Decreases in Ventilator Counts

Through HospiScope, Global Health Intelligence (GHI) tracks counts for a wide range of equipment types in Latin American hospitals. At the end of 2019, we completed our data collection and verification for hospitals in 14 countries.

To get a sense of the amount of ventilators on hand in Latin American hospitals to deal with the coronavirus crisis, we compared the amount of ventilators in the region’s hospitals in 2017 to the amount registered in December 2019, when we completed our verification of data for the year.

As you can see in the chart below, in that period, the vast majority of Latin American hospitals showed significant decreases in their ventilator counts:

The only country that posted an increase in ventilators for that time period, was Brazil, with a 30% uptick.

We also looked at countries with directly comparable data between 2018 and 2019, and in doing so observed that all countries we tracked all posted drops in ventilator counts:

Given the current crisis, this is of major concern, suggesting that hospitals may not be as well-equipped as they should be to handle patients severely affected by the coronavirus to the point where they need ventilators.

For manufacturers of medical equipment, this could represent a significant opportunity and it’s likely that these companies are experiencing a surge in orders.

In addition, there could be an opportunity for other equipment manufacturers who can shift to producing ventilators, provided, of course, that the regulatory environments in specific countries allow for this.

Next Steps

Please contact us if your organization requires additional data on specific Latin American hospitals or hospitals in specific countries to assess their readiness for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our HospiScope database tracks data for more than 19,000 hospitals across the region in 17 countries.