The Board of Directors of the Institute of Social Welfare (IPS) has a new member. Mirtha Arias, an employee of the Municipality of Asunción for 38 years and former president of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), assumed the position of representative of the labor sector, replacing Víctor Insfrán Dietrich. With her inauguration, Arias becomes the first woman to hold this seat on the board in eight decades.
In her first statements, the councilor stated that her management will have a human and gender focus. After visiting the IPS Central Hospital, Arias said she was moved by the reality of mothers with children hospitalized in intensive care. “I have already seen the IPS shelter, the desperation of mothers due to the lack of medicines and sometimes not even having a plate of food. I would like to be like a godmother to the shelters,” she declared.
Arias also promised to review the bureaucratic hurdles that delay benefits. “There are people who, due to two or three days of employer delay, cannot receive their maternity leave, or injured workers who are left without coverage. We need to optimize this so that IPS truly serves the worker,” she said.
The new councilor distinguished the current challenges from those faced by her predecessors, who found the IPS with “astronomical and catastrophic” debts. Now, she said, it is time to rebuild basic management and daily services. She criticized the long lines at the Central Hospital, where elderly people “walk lost from one sector to another,” and proposed a reengineering of staff to offer personalized and guided care.
Among the announced measures are the modernization of the Call Center and the renewal of appointment scheduling channels. Arias acknowledged that the medical area is the most critical point of the IPS and where the greatest technical control will be concentrated. She also defended the use of technology and data cross-referencing with other state institutions to monitor the number of employees in companies and ensure that everyone is contributing.
Finally, she appealed to the working youth to demand labor formalization from employers, as a way to sustain and improve the public health system.