Incorporating 6,000 doctors in primary care would cost 358 million euros, according to the Collegiate Medical Organization

• Profession Violence against doctors returns: 612 cases in 2021

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

The collapse of hospitals, delays in cancer diagnoses, worse vaccination coverage.

..these would be some of the consequences of the end of primary care in Spain.

The Primary Care Forum has decided that it is time to make clear the role of the first level of care and that its increasingly acute crisis will have consequences for the health of the population.

The measures of the action plan for primary and community care 2022-2023

approved by the Interterritorial Council on December 15 are only good words, until the financing is finalized.

The communities have, in theory, until this month of March to specify the autonomous implementation and the supposed cost of the measures, some of which would have to be financed 50% by the Ministry of Health.

According to estimates by the Collegiate Medical Organization (OMC), just

to redistribute the cards in a more balanced way

Some autonomies such as Madrid or the Valencian Community have already presented their strategies, although they have met with the dissatisfaction of the professionals.

And it is that doctors already have too many examples of diagnoses and documents that end up on wet paper or are insufficient.

"

", warns the president of the Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine (Semfyc), María Fernández, who fears that in practice the budgets that are assigned for the first level end up in hospital care.

Hence, on the occasion of Primary Care Day 2022, which will be held on April 20, in the coming weeks the members of the Forum will launch the

campaign , with messages to raise awareness among citizens of the importance of this level of care and what would happen in the event that, as everything indicates if things do not change, it disappears.

Concha Sánchez Pina, president of the Spanish Association of Primary Care Paediatrics (AEPap), recalls once again that the last primary care strategy

and also links it to the fact that the study on the needs of specialists mentions specifically that fewer paediatricians will be needed in the future.

Members of the Primary Care Forum after the presentation of the campaign #DefendamosLaPrimaria.CGCOM

All this can have serious consequences, he warns, especially for families with few financial means:

"Without primary care paediatricians by 2025-2030, childhood cancer will be diagnosed later and therefore have a worse prognosis, childhood obesity will grow and there will be more income from children, with the consequent increase in cost".

"

", remembers the president of the WTO, Tomás Cobo.

Despite the fact that "public, universal and free healthcare is a social axis", this is not appreciated in the environment of the political groups, he laments, "who have the responsibility of generating real measures and action to sustain the SNS. Little by little the ship is separating from the dock and we are letting it go...".

A "ridiculous" expense to increase the templates

The president of Semfyc recalls that, according to the new study of specialist needs, the number of public health doctors fell by 1.7% between 2018 and 2021, but

.

"This is not how the AP defends itself, we only build a hospital-centric model," laments Fernández.

Faced with this downsizing, professionals have been insisting for years that more primary care physicians are needed.

According to estimates by the WTO, in order for

.

Those 6,000 more doctors would cost 358 million (280 in the case of Family and 78 in Pediatrics).

As explained to this newspaper by Vicente Matas, coordinator of the Center for Studies of the Medical Union of Granada and author of said calculation, "the average cost of gross annual salary for a doctor who starts can be around 47,000 and the social security that must pay the service of health is about 13,000 euros a year, always bearing in mind that there are many differences between autonomies".

"It is a ridiculous expense with the benefits it can have, it is a matter of political will"

, highlights Hermenegildo Marcos, member of rural Primary Care of the WTO, who recalls that the 1,000 million planned for the development of the 2019 primary care plan ended being used, according to the Ministry of Health, to acquire Covid vaccines.

It should be remembered that two thirds of the 42,000 primary care physicians, according to WTO figures, are over 50 years old (a third of the total is over 60) and

, according to the projection made by experts from the Ministry of Health: "We have 5-6 hard years ahead of us, in which the current situation will worsen."

The communities are going to work, in theory, on the autonomous development of the state strategy, beginning to study contracting figures.

But it is a deception, according to Sánchez Pina, because he assures "there are no family doctors or new pediatricians to hire."

What needs to be done is

, starting with state criteria to encourage professionals to go to areas of difficult coverage.

Luciana Nechifor, president of the State Council of Medicine Students (CEEM), has indicated that it is also possible to work from the university sphere.

"We need to increase the weight of primary care within the university degree curricula and make it more noticeable and attractive to students.

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