“The situation of primary care has been very bad for years, but with the pandemic has become demented and is taking advantage to finish destroying it completely.”
Who speaks like this is Nati, an administrative of the City Health Center of Journalists, but the lament of it is not particular, but the mantra that repeat all those around it.
With the Sixth Wave Camping at its wide and having already dragged the high level of risk to six autonomies, the health centers begin to withstand an unsustainable pressure that adds to fatigue and deterioration that the first assistance level already dragged since it was more than one
Decade due to lack of chronic funding personnel and deficit.
In those circumstances, the respite of a Sunday of Sun in Madrid invited a walk through the Retiro, but as Nati Miles of Sanitarians and staff of primary care centers of several cities of Spain (Valencia, Asturias, Aragon, Murcia and Cádiz . On the 14th it is summoned throughout Andalusia) they have decided to spend their day of rest in going out to the streets enfned into vindicative shirts and banners to demand politicians an immediate solution for primary care, to claim that promises on first improvement Handicraft level of Spanish health stop being promises and become facts, so that it is assumed that “the improvement of primary care is a matter of state because its current situation seriously affects the rights of citizens,” as Humberto explains Muñoz, Secretary General of the FSS-CCOO, one of the convening entities of the demonstration that has added more than a hundred union and sanitary associations this Sunday.
And it is that it does not matter to who wonders in the marabunta of people who have traveled this Sunday the symbolic path from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Finance to the cry of Save Primary Care: Doctors, Nurses, Emergency Technicians, Staff
Administration, psychologists … The problem of primary care is affecting everyone and is far from being a simple wages or stability claim.
“The situation of primary care is critical and administration only offers promises, we believe that the time of promises is over and it is now about the facts. The problem is not just money but if there is no money there can be no more professionals,
Neither improvements in the infrastructure of the centers, “explains Marciano Sánchez Bayle, president of the Federation of Associations in defense of public health, another of the convening entities.
Sánchez Bayle does not trust “the plan that has announced the Ministry of Health for Primary Care because it does not really appear in the General Budgets of the State for 2022. In those of the year 2021 there were 1,089 million euros theoretically for the primary care strategy and
That is known has not been spent a Euro and we are on December 12, so there are reasonable suspicions that nothing is going to be done “really.
His words refer to the commitment acquired a month ago by autonomies and Ministry of Health to reach before the end of the year an agreement for a plan that revives primary care and that, in principle, would be endowed with at least one billion euros, one
Quantity that does not end up reaching and, in any case, the sector considers insufficient for the long list of pending tasks.
And is that, currently primary care has only 14% of the total health budget despite resolving 85% of the health problems of the Spaniards.
Without a budget there is no personnel and without personnel “all prevention, home care, etc. They are being relegated,” says Estaster Nieto, Secretary of the Federation of Primary Care Nursing Associations, which claims average to be able to return to the
Essence of primary care, prevention.
To that lack of means that is causing closure of centers and lack of accessibility of patients to the system also referred to Daniel, technician of the Summa, which has gone to the demonstration because “the closure of health centers is causing that to go to the doctor of family you have to wait two or three weeks and then have only telephone, not face-to-face, and that for us as an emergency service is a huge overload because if the patient can not go to primary care calls 112 and in the end it has to go A hospital and that causes a collapse of hospitals … Primary care must be saved to save all health, “he says, claiming a solution to problems like this even above those of” work precarious we also have “. He knows it well, with 17 years of activity in Summa continues without a fixed square, as well as 90% of emergency technicians who remain interim and those who have never been convened an opposition to stabilize their posts.
The lack of personnel and time to attend to patients is also in the mouth of Teresa García Herreros, president of doctors in the world in the Community of Madrid.
She works as a family doctor in a health center and says she is in the demonstration because “we need public policies that are accompanied by budget, we see that the deterioration of primary care throughout Spain is harming the most vulnerable populations that they have seen
How the accessibility and time of consultation decreased very much, and that greatly harms the most vulnerable patients because to serve a person with an idiomatic barrier, more time or to detect, for example, cases of gender violence or to serve people
Senior and alone with multiple pathologies, more consultation time is required and in the current conditions it is impossible “.
And the problem does not really do more than start.
Maria does not suffer problems of work stability, she has been exercising 30 years and has a fixed square as a clinical psychologist, but she has also come to the streets because “with all the emotional and mental health sequels of the pandemian has increased the psychology staff in
Primary care “.
Ana French, UGT health secretary, summarizes the list of pending tasks for primary care: “You have to reduce waiting lists, update the portfolio of services, improve the diagnostic test catalog, visualize the rural environment, end the
Temporality and work precariousness that workers suffer and increase human and material resources. We need doctors and nurses and physiotherapists, and family doctors are going to private health, other countries or other medical specialties because primary school does not
He is being attractive to them. ”
With the cries of “Save the Health” and thundering from the way of the Ministry of Finance, the leader of CCOO, UNADO, concrete in figures that various catalog of claims that and primary care after years of whips, from the deburocratization of
Its tasks to the ability to request more clinical trials or have sanitary technology as ecographs or even cars for travel between peoples and safety to avoid being assaulted.
What is needed, according to Deaf, is to reach at least 7.2% of GDP dedicated to healing and 25% of that budget focus on primary care.
A long way forward if we take into account that currently health spending does not reach 6% and the weight of primary care brushes 15% of the total.