WILLEMSTAD - Chronically ill migrants who come to Curaçao without papers fall into an abyss. The Healthcare Inspectorate is therefore very concerned about this. Moreover, this puts pressure on the island's existing healthcare.

"This includes HIV patients who need structurally expensive drugs, kidney patients who need dialysis, long-term intensive care treatment, and patients who get cancer and need treatment for this," says Sirving Keli, Acting Inspector General of the Health Inspectorate.

According to him, that group is also growing. “You have to imagine that people come from a country where healthcare has not been functioning optimally for years. So the people are coming here in a worse condition. " The inspectorate has therefore asked organizations that provide humanitarian assistance to these undocumented migrants to include chronic diseases in their package.

The more undocumented migrants come to Curaçao, the greater the pressure on existing health care on the island, says Keli. "Healthcare cannot handle that."

In recent years it has mainly concerned Venezuelans who come without papers. They are entitled to care, just like everyone else who stays on the island. That duty of care for the government is regulated in the constitution. The costs of that care are borne by the government.

Hospital spokesman Germaine Gibbs says the numbers are very low at the moment. "This concerns 0.5% of the patients of Curaçao Medical Center." But according to Keli it is not the emergency care that drives up the costs of undocumented migrants, but the chronic care in which the large amounts are.

27-year-old doctor Elisa Janzen has started the Salú pa Tur clinic where she provides free care to undocumented migrants. She cooperates in this with, among others, the UN refugee organization UNHCR. These are treatments or, for example, control that these patients did not receive before and which made them unnecessarily ill or much worse.

She says that more and more patients are finding their way to the clinic. Four months after the opening, the clinic already received the thousandth patient. "We prefer not to talk about numbers, but we do see an increase in the number of consultations," says Janszen.

By Kim Hendriksen