About thirty NGOs, brought together in the platform ‘I do attend’, denounce the failures in the health care received by the migrants who arrived in cayuco, welcomed in centers of the state reception network, after the death of the young Malian Diallo Sissoko in the Alcalá de Henares emergency center last week. The organizations have urged the Government and the autonomous communities to improve the care provided to these people due to the health problems that arose during the trip and the language barrier they encounter. “We must demand the structural and organizational resizing of the health facilities available in the usual arrival enclaves, as well as in the municipalities where the reception centers are located, to be able to provide a realistic response to the entire population,” they have demanded in a community.
According to the Platform, those who arrive in Spain through the Canary Islands “do so in very unsafe conditions, enduring journeys of even more than 10 days immobile, with little food and water, exposed to inclement weather (low temperatures, wind, humidity, solar radiation) and traumatic situations.” The journey usually entails “health problems directly derived from traveling on a precarious boat that can worsen and can even lead to death.” To detect them and be able to treat them, they add, “appropriately trained health teams are required, who know the specific pathology linked to these circumstances and have the appropriate means.”
In some of the Canary Islands, experience has been acquired in providing health care to them, “determining quality health care as essential immediately upon arrival and in the days and weeks that follow,” the statement maintains. But not all the places where these people end up have the specialized care that these cases require. “Due to the barriers in the management of care for migrant people, the inequalities of the system, inherent racism, some cultural and language issues and the vulnerable situation of newcomers, care only when the patient requests it is not It is shown to be sufficient to detect potentially serious health problems, with the individual assessment of each person upon arrival and subsequent re-evaluation being essential, ensuring close medical follow-up for the duration of the reception period and guaranteeing patients’ access to services. sanitary”, he asked. For this reason, they request that the resources of the National Health System should “correspond to the complexity of the socio-health needs of this population”, given that migration has become something structural in Spain.
Currently, they maintain, in the reception system, as well as in the national health system, there is a “lack of intercultural mediation and specialized socio-health resources.” One of the failures detected is the language barrier due to the lack of interpreters. “Communication in all its dimensions is the fundamental pillar of any medical act: the presence of professional intercultural interpreters and mediators is necessary at any time during the process, avoiding as much as possible an underdiagnosis that could be fatal,” the statement says.
Diallo Sissoko, 21, died after at least a week complaining of severe pain in his chest and one of his legs, while he saw that his cries were not sufficiently attended to at the Príncipe de Asturias Hospital – where he was taken on 15 October – nor in the reception center, from which they did not send him to the hospital again despite the fact that the symptoms persisted.
According to the organization, the boy had gone to the reception center’s infirmary on several occasions due to chest pain and severe pain in one leg, for which he had been referred to the Príncipe de Asturias University Hospital on Tuesday, October 15. From there he came out with a diagnosis of respiratory infection, but Accem assures that the hospital only prescribed painkillers. Since then, Diallo Sissoko went to the infirmary twice more. The last time, this Monday, the boy was under observation until he began to get worse, so the center staff called the ambulance, and he went into cardiorespiratory arrest.
Added to this case is the death of the young Moroccan Shad Karim, 22, in a shelter in San Fernando de Henares (Madrid) in March of this year, the death in February 2022 of another 20-year-old Malian in a shelter in Tenerife and the discovery in 2023 in a reception center in El Hierro of the lifeless body of another young man after his arrival.
The Secretary of State for Migration does not require health services to be provided in reception centers, nor in emergency centers that house thousands of people shortly after their arrival in cayuco, although they clarify that they coordinate with the health system of the corresponding autonomous communities.
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