The strike of the group of senior health technicians is causing havoc in Catalonia (mainly in the city of Barcelona and the province). Because? Because laboratory technicians, without going any further, are only analyzing blood extractions related to urgent, oncological and non-postponable cases – as stated in the minimum service order issued at the time by the Minister of Business and Work, Roger Torrent – , while the rest are being discarded. This situation has forced some CAPs in Barcelona to modify the extraction protocol.

Until recently, blood was drawn from anyone who required it. Now, on the contrary, and as explained by a family doctor to La Vanguardia, only extractions linked to urgent cases are performed. In this sense, it is the doctor who establishes that urgency.

“We follow the order issued by the Minister of Labor,” explains José Joaquín Durán, 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 have to do what is urgent, what is oncological and what cannot be postponed. What does not meet these requirements is not done.”

Sources from the Health Department confirm this point. “Analytics are being carried out for the essential activity indicated in the DOGC of November 29: urgent requests, critical care units, covid activity, patients undergoing oncological treatment… The rest of the analyzes are being rescheduled where the strike has a high incidence ”.

Thus, Sietess recommends that the population “not undergo extraction” in the event that they go to the CAP and are informed there that senior technicians in clinical laboratories or pathological anatomy and cytodiagnosis are still on indefinite strike. And that blood, if extracted, will not be analyzed and will be discarded 48 hours after it was taken if it is not urgent.

“When the samples arrive at the laboratory, we do what the minimum order states: the extractions from the cases included in said order are analyzed, the rest is collected and stored cold,” says Durán. “What happens – he continues – is that after 48 hours the samples are useless because they have aged, the cells are dying…”

This scenario is leading to “delays in the analysis,” says the family doctor who has attended to this newspaper. “Yesterday I had to evaluate the results of a patient’s analysis and I couldn’t do it because they didn’t analyze the sample in the laboratory. They have now given him a new appointment for the extraction for mid-February. The patients are angry and ask us to process their extractions as if they were urgent.”

From Sietess they remember that senior health technicians are the ones who make “the main diagnosis of all hospitals.” “Cancer cannot be diagnosed if we do not perform our techniques: we are the ones who do cytological screening, biopsies, nuclear medicine, CT scans or MRIs and tumor markers. Like cancer, any other disease cannot be diagnosed without our work,” Durán emphasizes.