On the day that the king visited Ibn Rochd, a university hospital that is something of a showcase for Morocco’s public health system, a woman was screaming at hospital employees for attention at a nearby blood transfusion center. She said her mother was in a surgical unit at a hospital half an hour away and she urgently needed to buy blood so that the doctors could operate.

“The hospital doesn’t have any blood, and the center does not have enough available blood,” said the woman, who gave her name as Nora, 30. “We donated our blood and have been waiting for hours and we still don’t know when we will get what we need.

“My mother is going to die if we don’t get the blood back to the hospital fast enough.”

A few miles away, in the emergency room of Mohamed Baouafi Hospital, a patient who identified herself only as Hada, 69, said she had been hit by a car. She sat waiting on an old examination bed with no sheets, begging fruitlessly for an injection to kill the pain.

“Our stocks are very limited. We keep them for people in extreme pain,” the doctor in charge, a resident trainee, told her.

Baouafi Hospital has no intensive care unit and the operating theater has been closed for renovation since April 2011, according to a sign on the door, though no sign of renovation work could be seen. Hospital employees said patients requiring surgery were transferred to other hospitals in Casablanca.

Outside, people holding prescriptions begged passers-by to help them buy medicine. Inside, some patients offered bribes of the equivalent of a dollar or two to guards who could help them skirt hours in waiting lines.

Few medical tests were available at the hospital’s own laboratory.

“When a child comes in with meningitis, we must perform a lumbar puncture, but we can’t because we don’t have the equipment to do it,” said a doctor who asked not to be identified by name because complaining might cost him his job. “So we try to use our instincts to guess if they’re sick or not.”