Given the lack of health workers in the Community of Madrid, the option of the Ministry of Health, directed by Fátima Matute, is to send health professionals, that is, doctors, paediatricians, nurses and assistants, from other nearby centers, to the new recently created outpatient clinics. .
This proposal is on point 7 of the agenda of the health sector table that tomorrow will be held between the general director of human resources, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, with the main health unions in the Community of Madrid, among which stand out Amyts, CCOO, UGT and Satse, among others.
The three affected clinics are Las Tablas in the north of the capital, Parque Oeste in Alcorcón and Navalcarnero II. The Madrid Health Ministry’s solution is to deploy professionals from other centers, while the unions ask for new hires.
A spokesperson for the Madrid Health Department recalls that in the winter plan it had planned and budgeted to hire 1,800 professionals and only 1,027 have been recruited “because there are no doctors.” Hence, Madrid demands more MIR places from the Ministry of Health so that “then everything goes in a chain.”
In the new center in Las Tablas, 5 family doctors, a pediatrician, 5 nurses, a nursing assistant and two administrative assistants have been forced to transfer from the nearby Sanchinarro center or from others. “This clinic has been assigned 58,146 health cards, of which so far only 7,000 have been transferred to the Las Tablas clinic, when it is built to serve 29,358 patients,” say medical union sources.
The unions denounce that this situation is unsustainable. From Amyts, they point out to La Vanguardia that there is a lack of 800 family doctors and 270 pediatricians in the Community of Madrid. While the nurses union, Satse, is demanding almost 1,000 more nurses. They require two more nurses per center, one for the morning shift and another for the afternoon shift. And they remember that “in the Community of Madrid there are 427 primary care centers.”
The problem is that these new outpatient clinics do not have assigned personnel and the Ministry of Health is forcing professionals to work from others due to an order that was issued based on the years they have been practicing in public health. And they intend to continue with the same strategy in the face of the lack, they defend, “of professionals in the region.”
For Isabel Gómez, head of CCOO for primary care, “the World Health Organization recommends one doctor for 1,500 patients and, for example, the Las Tablas center with the current staff exceeds 2,000.” Furthermore, she adds, “it is unacceptable that a neighborhood that has one of the highest rates of boys and girls in Spain only has one pediatrician.” And they put more data on the table: “We know that not all patients are assigned to the Sanchinarro center because there are citizens who continue to go to the Fuencarral center or others in Madrid, since they did not request the change as they were still registered outside the neighborhood.”
Gómez recalls that the solution is “to hire new staff with good working conditions and not to take professionals from one center to another.”
The new center of Alcorcón is experiencing a situation similar to that of the northern neighborhood of Madrid; while Navalcarnero is called to serve a population of 11,000 inhabitants, but until now it does not have any pediatrician.
