The Ministry of Health has proposed to the unions, in the context of the negotiations of the new framework statute for health professionals, that the heads of service of public hospitals be obliged to have exclusive dedication. That is, they cannot also work in private healthcare.
The head of the department, Mónica García, announced this Wednesday the measure, “open to dialogue”, as a way to “prevent conflicts of interest” among doctors after “knowing cases of professionals who have obtained obscene benefits” thanks to this compatibility. “No one thinks that this is required of any director or manager and now we want to extend it to intermediate positions. It is so obvious that it is obscene that we have not done it before,” he noted in a press conference.
The text has not yet been completely closed by the Ministry, according to García, but the most important measures have been advanced to the unions and communities. “Now we have to sit down and deal with the fine print, but the Ministry’s proposals have been well accepted. Now we will have to see how it fits with a long and complex legislative process.”
Health’s intention is to also extend the obligation of exclusivity to workers who request reductions in working hours and reinstate the supplement to compensate professionals who practice exclusively in public health. In other words, a plus for full dedication.
The first scheduled meeting will be on January 22 with the unions and at the beginning of February with the councils. The department will have to report the document to the Interterritorial Council, once it is closed, and go through the Council of Ministers before reaching Congress.
The Ministry assures that it does not have figures on how many heads of service this measure could affect if it finally goes ahead, although García slips that the “majority” of these positions already have exclusive dedication because “they are intense enough to have other jobs ”.
Some communities already limit hospital managers from making it compatible with the private sector, according to Health sources, although the expectation is that it will also be explicitly included in a text that has not been reformed for two decades. It remains to be determined whether there will be more intermediate positions that will be affected by this measure, if it is finally included in the reform.
The department’s initial forecasts were that the framework statute would be approved before the end of 2024, although negotiations have not yet ended and the Ministry is cautious about when it will go ahead. Among the issues that must be addressed in this text are the 24-hour guards that the Ministry promised almost a year ago to reduce to at least 5 p.m.
The minister has warned that there are already some hospitals that are applying this reduction and has advanced that the idea is to “give flexibility for adaptation”, so that time is given to the “services that are most underfunded”.
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