Primary care takes to the streets to ask for help in the face of "unsustainable pressure"

• Budgets Health only gives primary care 4.4% of what it needs to function in the post-Covid era

• Saturation Primary Care hits rock bottom: waiting lists of months and 60 patients a day

• Health Profession remodels primary care with an "obsolete" plan and without an economic item

"The situation of

has been very bad for years, but

completely."

The one who speaks like this is Nati, an administrator from the Ciudad de los Periodistas Health Center, but her lament is not particular, but rather the mantra that everyone around her repeats.

With the sixth wave rampant and having already dragged six autonomies to the high risk level, health centers are beginning to endure

that adds to the fatigue and deterioration that the first level of care had already dragged on for more than one year. decade due to

.

Under these circumstances, the respite of a sunny Sunday in Madrid invited a stroll through the Retiro, but like Nati, several hundred health workers and staff from primary care centers in

(Valencia, Asturias, Aragón, Murcia and Cádiz. On the 14th it is convened throughout Andalusia) have decided to spend their rest day going out into the streets wearing protest shirts and banners to

, to demand that the promises to improve the first level of Spanish health care cease to be promises and become facts, so that it is assumed that "the improvement of primary care is a matter of State because its current situation seriously affects the rights of citizenship ", as explained by Humberto Muñoz, general secretary of the FSS-CCOO, one of the entities that convened the demonstration that this Sunday has joined more than a hundred trade union and health associations.

And it is that it does not matter who is asked in the crowd of people who have traveled this Sunday the symbolic path from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Finance to the cry of

: doctors, nurses, emergency technicians, personnel of administration, psychologists ...

and is far from being a simple labor demand for salaries or stability.

"The primary care situation is critical and

. We believe that the time for promises is over and it is now the facts. The problem is not only money but if there is no money there cannot be more professionals, nor improvements in the infrastructure of the centers ", explains Marciano Sánchez Bayle, president of the Federation of Associations in Defense of Public Health, another of the convening entities.

Sánchez Bayle does not trust "the plan that the Ministry of Health has announced for primary care because it

In those of 2021 there were theoretically 1,089 million euros for the Primary Care Strategy and As far as is known, not a euro has been spent and it is December 12, so there are reasonable suspicions that nothing is going to be done "really.

His words refer to the commitment made a month ago by the autonomies and the Ministry of Health to reach an agreement before the end of the year for a plan that revives primary care and that, in principle, would be endowed with at least one billion euros, a an amount that has not yet arrived and that, in any case, the sector considers insufficient for the long list of pending tasks to be fixed. And is that, currently primary care

of the Spanish.

Without a budget there are no staff and without staff "all prevention, home care, etc. are being relegated," denounces Ester Nieto, secretary of the Federation of Primary Care Nursing Associations, who claims means to be able to return to the essence of primary care, prevention.

Head of the march in Madrid.

Daniel, a SUMMA technician, also refers to this lack of means that is causing the closure of centers and the lack of accessibility of patients to the system, who has attended the demonstration because "the closure of health centers is causing them

, and that for us as an emergency service is an enormous overload because if the patient cannot go to primary care, call 112 and in the end they have to go a hospital and that causes a collapse of hospitals ... We

", he affirms, claiming a solution to problems like this, even above those of" job insecurity that we also have. "He knows it well, with 17 years of activity at SUMMA, he continues without a fixed position, as do 90% of technicians from emergencies that continue to be temporary and to which an opposition has never been summoned to stabilize their posts.

The lack of personnel and time to attend to patients is also on the lips of Teresa García Herreros, president of Doctors of the World in the Community of Madrid.

She works as a family doctor in a health center and says she is at the demonstration because "we need public policies that are accompanied by a budget. We see that the deterioration of primary care throughout Spain

who have seen accessibility and consultation time greatly diminish, and this greatly harms the most vulnerable patients because it takes more time to care for a person with a language barrier or to detect, for example, cases of gender-based violence or to Caring for elderly and lonely people with multiple pathologies requires more consultation time and under current conditions it is impossible. "

And the problem has really only just begun.

María does not suffer from job stability problems, she has been practicing for 30 years and has a permanent position as a clinical psychologist, but she has also taken to the streets because "with all the emotional and mental health consequences of the pandemic

in primary care ".

Ana Francés, Secretary of Health at UGT, summarizes the list of pending tasks for primary care: "We must reduce the waiting lists, update the portfolio of services, improve the catalog of diagnostic tests, visualize the rural environment, end the temporary employment and precariousness suffered by workers and increase human and material resources. We have a shortage of doctors and nurses and physiotherapists, and

medical specialties because primary school does not it's being attractive to them. "

With the shouts of "Let's save health" already thundering in the background on the way to the Ministry of Finance, the CCOO leader, Unai Sordo, specifies in figures that diverse catalog of demands that has already dragged primary care after years of lashes, since the debureaucratization of their tasks to the ability to request more clinical tests or have health technology such as ultrasound scanners or even cars for trips between towns and security to avoid being attacked. What is needed, according to Sordo, is to

. A long road ahead if one takes into account that currently health spending does not reach 6% and the weight of primary care is close to 15% of the total.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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