Areas of difficult healthcare coverage, the “medical deserts”, are and will be a growing problem in the coming decade, according to the General Council of Official Medical Associations (Cgcom). For this reason, through the national voice of the youngest, he has denounced that the resident doctors are “being used in an unjustified way to alleviate this situation”.
A study carried out by the Cgcom on the perception of young doctors regarding the areas of difficult coverage (made to 52 members representing the 50 provinces and the two autonomous cities) reveals that 91% perceive “medical deserts” as a problem in their province and 44.4% say that final year residents are being used to cover the aforementioned areas.
This, according to the study, not only undermines the figure of the professional in training, but also threatens the safety and quality of care with which the population in areas with difficult coverage must be treated.
“We want to warn that we are dealing with an emerging problem all over Europe and that it can get complicated if we don’t put remedies in place now”, María Isabel Moya, vice-president of the Cgcom, explains to La Vanguardia.
Moya understands that the problem has a multifactorial genesis, “either because of the working conditions offered in Spain, the competition between autonomous communities, the difficulty of hiring in certain areas, the mobility throughout Europe that professionals now have or the living conditions and infrastructures in certain geographical areas”.
All this, he adds, “is complicating a basic principle of our health system, which is accessibility”.
71% of the respondents also confess that there are no initiatives in their province to assign resident doctors in areas with difficult coverage, and affirm that offering economic incentives in terms of travel or housing and improvements in working conditions would be a point of “attraction”.
According to Moya, not only would economic incentives be necessary so that residents who have trained in a place with difficult coverage remain there, but incentives of another kind are also needed: “Scoring, for example, more in examinations, also in the professional career… In other words, benefiting the professional in some way”.
Family and community medicine, psychiatry, immunology and occupational medicine stand out as the specialties with the greatest deficit by 2035, and most likely to be affected by this problem.
According to the study, the “medical desert” implies the “continuous and permanent” inability of a population to access health services. Although this situation takes place mostly in rural areas, Moya recalled, during the presentation of the report that took place on Friday, that it also affects high-density cities and county hospitals that face great difficulties in retaining talent and recruiting specialist doctors
The places with difficult coverage, according to the report, are those that meet up to three requirements of the 13 they have listed. Among the latter, that the distance or travel time from the health center to the reference hospital center is more than 70 km or 40 minutes or that the average weekly distance traveled from the health center to the clinics that make up it is greater than 100 km or five hours a week, as regards the time reference.
Also that the population density is lower than the average density of populations of less than 5,000 inhabitants, that the number of patients is greater than 35 per day or that continuous care is required with more than four guards per month.
In the words of Dr. Domingo A. Sánchez, coordinator of the study, “the success of the report lies in the fact that it is the first step to address a problem that is in full swing.”
