The Minister of Health, Manel Balcells, has stated that he has obtained from the Minister of Health, Mónica García, the commitment, this same year, to reclassify health professionals in the workplace and increase their salaries in accordance with the new classification. Both leaders met for two hours at the ministry headquarters.
At the end of the meeting, Balcells held a press conference at the Government delegation in Madrid in which he fulfilled his commitment to convey the demands of the professionals to the minister. “At this moment, this already depends on the ministry,” he stated after recalling the strikes of nurses, laboratory technicians and nursing assistants held in Catalonia.
According to Balcells, García has committed to starting the process immediately in two lines: agreeing on the professional reclassification with the Public Service, which is on whom this organization depends, and developing the framework statute of the statutory personnel of the health services, a maneuver pending since 2003, to increase salaries. This requires collective bargaining.
“Nurses are graduates – previously, diploma holders – and their professional level must correspond to level A1, senior technicians must raise B and nursing assistants to C1,” said the minister. Salut has quantified between 400 and 450 million euros per year the cost of reclassification in Catalonia in the case of nursing alone. Doctors also demand to go up to level A1.
Although, according to Balcells, the head of Health has considered the demands “fair and necessary” and the two parties have committed to holding bilateral meetings to monitor compliance with the commitments, there is not even an economic report from Mónica García’s cabinet. , nor a very explicit positioning, nor are deadlines mentioned. Furthermore, it limits the discomfort only to nursing.
The Ministry of Health has sent off the meeting with a very brief press release: “The conflict that has been experienced in the infirmary has been addressed, among other topics, and both (minister and councilor) have agreed to work together on the reclassification and a new framework statute. In this sense, both have defended the dialogue with the sector and their willingness to meet their demands.”
Coinciding with the summit, nearly half a thousand professionals, most of them members of the Infermeres de Catalunya union, have gathered in front of the ministry to demand professional reclassification, as well as the recognition of nursing specialties and retirement at 60 years of age.
On the other hand, Balcells has reproached García for the underfinancing of the Health Service and has obtained the promise that the ministry will immediately pay 50 million of the cohesion funds (the debt for the care in Catalonia of patients from other communities in the last 8 years ).
Likewise, they have agreed that there is a shortage of clinical psychologists or that the role of psychologists in general and of non-specialized doctors should be regulated.
Although García has refused to transfer the management of the pharmaceutical expenditure claimed by Balcells, he has granted the participation of Catalonia in the evaluation of the medicines that should or should not enter the portfolio of services and in the commission that negotiates the price with the laboratories. of these drugs. “Cordial, long, with a lot of content and beneficial,” is how Balcells defined the meeting with Mónica García.
