Juan Soler was a deputy for the Popular Party in the Madrid Assembly and a senator for the same party until June 2023. This Tuesday, Soler denounced the collapse of Madrid’s public health system. “At Ramón y Cajal they don’t pick up the phone,” he criticizes the public hospital in the Fuencarral-El Pardo district of the capital. “For days I have been trying to contact them to change a date and they have not taken any of my more than 40, I repeat, 40, calls,” insists the former mayor of Getafe.
Indeed, Madrid’s public health system is not experiencing its best moment. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets more than a year ago to defend the Community’s public health care system and condemn the management of it carried out by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the PP of the Community of Madrid. More than 250,000 people demonstrated to demand “public health and solutions to the primary care plan.” President Díaz Ayuso, on the other hand, insists that Madrid’s healthcare is “the best in Europe.”
This same month, exactly last Thursday, the Madrid health unions filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Health of the Community of Madrid “for its very serious and repeated non-compliance with regard to the prevention of occupational risks in Primary Care.” These organizations —Amyts, CCOO, SATSE, CSIT Unión Profesional, UGT, CSIF and APSeMueve— assure that the Government of the Community of Madrid chaired by Díaz Ayuso “has been failing to comply with the 1995 law” on risk prevention for years.
Health center professionals have been denouncing a lack of staff for months. Groups of city residents have denounced this year the “dismantling” of public health that is occurring in the region. The Ministry of Health, however, disassociates itself from the demands of the unions and assures that there is no such dismantling. Meanwhile, Madrid residents have lost hundreds of beds every year since 2019 for treatment in public hospitals, 1,500 since that year and almost 300 since 2022. In 2023 there were 13,843 beds installed for admission care, less than the 14,817 in 2022.
The Popular Party of Madrid, of which Deputy Soler was a part, in turn accuses the Ministry of Health headed by the leader of Más Madrid, Mónica García, of having “busted everything.” “Everything has gotten absolutely worse, the waiting lists, the diagnoses, the surgeries, the outpatient consultations…,” Ayuso said in a session of the Madrid Assembly a few weeks ago.
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