Caprile y Interclínica intensifican campaña de prevención de ACV en el norte

Leo Caprile, the television personality and public health advocate, spent the second week of May traveling through Chile's northern regions with a message about minutes and survival. He was there on behalf of Interclínica, the private healthcare network, to talk about stroke—or ACV, as it's known in Spanish—and why recognizing its symptoms matters more than almost anything else a person can learn about their own body.

The numbers that prompted the tour were stark. In 2025, emergency room admissions for stroke at Interclínica facilities jumped 32.3 percent compared to the year before. Of those cases, 59 percent were men and 41 percent were women, with the increase among men particularly pronounced. In a healthcare system accustomed to gradual shifts, a spike of that magnitude signals something worth addressing directly, in person, with someone the public knows and trusts.

Caprile's itinerary took him to two cities: Arica and Iquique, where Interclínica operates San José and Tarapacá facilities respectively. In each location, the visit followed a similar pattern—meetings with patients who had survived strokes, interviews with local media, and conversations with the doctors who had treated them. The underlying message remained consistent: stroke is a time-dependent emergency, and the window for effective treatment is brutally narrow. Around four and a half hours. That's the span in which certain interventions can prevent permanent disability. Miss it, and the consequences compound.

In Arica, Caprile sat with patients who had benefited from Chile's Emergency Law—a regulation that guarantees immediate stroke treatment without requiring payment upfront and prioritizes stabilization above all else. These were people whose lives had been altered by stroke but whose outcomes had been shaped by access to rapid care. The visit also produced the first episode of a podcast recorded at San José Interclínica, featuring Dr. Karina Backit, who heads the critical care unit, and Dr. Carlos Vera, the emergency department chief. Vera articulated what every stroke survivor and their family members learn too late or, if they're fortunate, just in time: difficulty speaking, facial drooping, weakness on one side of the body. These are not subtle signs. They are the body's alarm system. Recognizing them and calling for help immediately can reshape everything that follows.

The Iquique portion of the campaign highlighted a different kind of milestone. Tarapacá Interclínica had recently performed its first pacemaker implant—a procedure that, until recently, would have required patients to travel to larger cities, adding days or weeks to their treatment timeline. Dr. Hernando Durán, the facility's medical director, framed this not as a technical achievement alone but as a shift in what's possible for people living in the north. The clinic now operates a hemodynamics unit, a specialized facility for diagnosing and treating heart and blood vessel conditions. A similar unit was being installed at the Arica location. These are not routine additions to a regional hospital. They represent the infrastructure needed to handle complex cardiovascular emergencies without forcing patients onto buses or planes during their most vulnerable hours.

Interclínica's facilities carry Angels certification, an international designation that verifies a hospital's readiness to manage ischemic stroke with the clinical skill, technology, and speed that the condition demands. The certification is not honorary. It reflects actual capacity—trained staff, imaging equipment, medications, protocols. It means that when someone in Iquique or Arica experiences a stroke, they don't face a choice between local care and distant expertise. They can receive both.

Caprile's role in this campaign was to translate medical urgency into human language. He spoke from his own understanding: you cannot always prevent a stroke, but you can prepare yourself to respond to one. You can learn the symptoms. You can know that four and a half hours is not a suggestion but a deadline. You can understand that the person next to you—a family member, a coworker, a stranger—might be experiencing the most time-sensitive medical emergency of their life, and your recognition of that fact, your willingness to act immediately, might determine whether they walk away whole or live with permanent disability. In the north, where distances between medical centers can be vast, that recognition has become even more consequential. The infrastructure is now in place to match urgency with response. The question that remains is whether enough people will recognize the moment when it arrives.