The strike by the group of senior health technicians is wreaking havoc in Catalonia (mainly in the city of Barcelona and the province). Because? Because the laboratory technicians, without going any further, analyze only the blood draws related to urgent, oncological and non-deferrable cases – as marked by the minimum services order dictated at the time by the Minister of Business and Work, Roger Torrent -, while that the rest are rejected. The situation has forced some CAPs to modify the extraction protocol.
Until recently, blood was drawn for everyone who required it. Now, on the contrary, and as a family doctor explains to La Vanguardia, only extractions linked to urgent cases are carried out. In this sense, it is the doctor who establishes this urgency.
“We are following the order given by the Labor Minister”, explains José Joaquín, secretary of organization and territory of the State Union of Senior Health Technicians (Sietess). “It is a minimum order in which it is said that we must do what is urgent, the oncological and what cannot be postponed. What does not meet these requirements, is not done”.
Sources from the Department of Health confirm this extreme. “Analytics are carried out for the essential activity indicated in the DOGC of November 29: urgent requests, critical units, covid activity, patients undergoing oncological treatment… The rest of the analytics is rescheduled where the strike has a high incidence”.
Therefore, from Sietess they recommend to the population “not to have the extraction” if they go to the CAP and inform them that the senior technicians in the clinical laboratory or pathological anatomy and cytodiagnostics are still on indefinite strike. In fact, this blood, if drawn, will not be analyzed and will be rejected 48 hours later if it is not urgent.
“When the samples arrive at the laboratory, we do what the order of minimums dictates: the extractions from the cases collected by the aforementioned order are analysed, the rest is collected and kept cold”, says Durán. “What happens – he continues – is that 48 hours later the samples are useless because they have aged, the cells are dying…”.
This scenario leads to “delays in the analyses”, says the family doctor who attended this newspaper. “Yesterday I had to assess the results of a patient’s analysis and I couldn’t do it because they didn’t analyze the sample in the laboratory. Now they have given him a new appointment for the extraction for mid-February. Patients are angry and ask us to run their extractions as if they were urgent”.
From Sietess remember that senior health technicians are the ones who make “the main diagnosis in all hospitals”. “Cancer cannot be diagnosed if we do not carry out our techniques: we are the ones who do cytological screenings, biopsies, nuclear medicine, CT scans or magnetic resonance imaging and tumor markers. Like cancer, any other disease cannot be diagnosed without our work”, emphasizes Durán.
