Next Wednesday, the Ministry of Health will impose the mandatory use of the mask in health centers throughout Spain through a declaration of coordinated actions to equalize protection against respiratory viruses for all citizens and legally protect the communities that have already implemented it. .
This has been reported to EFE by sources from the department headed by Mónica García, who specify that this decision is made under article 65 of the law on cohesion and quality of the National Health System, which regulates the declaration of coordinated actions in public health and which “binds all parties” included in it.
Years ago, public health, understood as the actions to be taken by policy makers to protect the health of citizens, was a field in which politics did not enter excessively. The general interest took precedence over partisan interests. But, especially since the pandemic, that talent disappeared, and citizens became accustomed to disagreements, whether about masks, tests, vaccines, or even healthy advice. And this Monday it was proven that it is not going to change, no matter how much respiratory viruses, especially the flu, threaten to collapse the health system.
This Monday, the majority of the autonomous communities said no to mandating the use of masks in health centers throughout the territory for as long as the epidemic wave lasts. Only Catalonia (which announced it on Friday) was clearly in favor, while others, such as Castilla-La Mancha (which has the highest incidence, with more than 1,700 cases per 100,000 inhabitants), left the majority to do so.
It so happens that the Government of Catalonia announced on Friday that it would declare this mandatory, but this Monday it had not yet published it in the DOGC. In the Interterritorial Council, not even the other two communities that have decreed its obligation, Valencia and Murcia, both governed by the PP, were in favor. Why did they act like this if they have imposed it in their region?
And to make matters worse, the Canary Islands, which were against it at that meeting, made the mask mandatory in health centers and hospitals when leaving.
And at the head of this political nonsense is Madrid, which does not even want to hear about obligations, despite the fact that health centers in its community have decreed the mandatory use of face masks in an attempt to contain the epidemic.
And in the midst of this political confrontation, health professionals (doctors, nurses and other workers, as well as scientific societies) and patients defend mandatory compliance in the face of the situation of “extreme” tension that exists in health centers. Likewise, they ask that vaccination campaigns be activated, which, this season, have been relegated to the background, a lack of initiative that partly explains the reduced vaccination coverage (barely 50%).
In this Monday’s plenary session, there was little debate about one of the measures being considered by the Minister of Health, Mónica García, and which is intended to de-bureaucratize primary care, something especially important in times of “extreme tension” in health centers. indicate from Health. At the moment, it is only a proposal being studied with other ministries, including Social Security.
It is about the “self-justification of three-day sick leave so that those who have a mild illness do not go to the doctor for a sick leave report,” García explained. “It is inefficient to ask citizens not to go to primary care for a mild flu and, at the same time, force them to go to ask for proof of sick leave. The measure would mean the potential saving of hundreds of thousands of consultations per year and would reflect a historic request from primary care professionals,” say sources from the Ministry of Health.
A measure like this is already applied in the United Kingdom (7 days), Portugal (3), Sweden or Germany. Furthermore, something similar was done in Spain during the pandemic, although legally it was different due to the existence of the state of alarm.
The Secretary of State for Health, Javier Padilla, recalls that “this is a measure requested by scientific and professional societies in the field of primary care, many of them with unwavering commitment to the defense of public health.” In this way, when a person cannot go to work due to mild respiratory symptoms, “this responsible statement is enough, which is a demand from family doctors,” he points out on his X (formerly Twitter) account.
The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, believes that this measure is an “occurrence.” Like her, most of the presidents of the PP.
