Economic incentives and advantages such as affordable housing, facilities for children’s schooling or means of transportation to make home visits. With these concessions, the Department of Health intends to fill the positions of doctors and nurses that are difficult to cover, those that have been vacant for more than a year, which usually coincide in rural areas and with tourist interest affected by the shortage of available housing.
The Manel Balcells Department works with the Micropobles de Catalunya association, which brings together municipalities with less than a thousand inhabitants, to guarantee health services in rural areas at a time of shortage of professionals. “The current system does not provide adequate service in non-urgent and specialty care,” considers the municipal organization. Providing homes for health workers, an aspect that Incasol, the town halls and Salut are working on, is seen as an incentive to attract and adhere health workers to the rural world.
According to Balcells, the plan would be endowed with around 5 million euros, will begin to be implemented within six months and will be under development for two years. Some Town Halls, such as Llardecans (Segrià), have long ago made the decision to offer the doctor a home to avoid being left without a doctor. Along the same lines, a year ago Salut decided to provide incentives of up to 9,000 euros per year to resident interns who decided to complete their training outside the Barcelona metropolitan area.
These measures are part of the so-called Action Plan to improve the attraction and loyalty of professionals to the Catalan health system in the face of a lack of professionals. Last year there were 41,187 registered doctors in Catalonia, of which 5,839 (16% of the active association and 26% of the specialists) will retire until 2027. Regarding nursing, of the 49,008 professionals, 3,907 may retire until 2027 when they turn 65. The lack of family and community medicine professionals is the most evident. Behind, there is a deficit in anesthesiology and resuscitation, psychiatry, occupational medicine, preventive medicine and public health or radiology.
The project to attract professionals is endowed with 40 million euros, apart from the improvements provided for in the ICS and Siscat (concerted) agreements. Its fields of action include the development of nursing specialties (with higher graduate remuneration), the increase in training places (640 in the Nursing degree, 145 in Medicine, 160 in Specialized Health Training and 1,230 in professional health training. Also the deployment of new professional roles in Primary (376 community emotional well-being referents, 152 dietitians, 370 physiotherapists, 365 dental hygienists).
But the “star proposal”, according to Balcells’ definition, “the great revolution of the system”, will be the so-called shared models. Through this system, professionals will be able to practice, while traveling, in hospitals of different levels and ownership and in Primary Care. “We will draw a new health map in which the ownership of the center no longer matters, but rather the care result, based on sharing professionals and having shared services. The proposal should allow us to have professionals where we do not have them”, explained Balcells. A shared model has solved the lack of pediatrics in the Pyrenees or endocrinology in Girona.
