The workload rises throughout the country during the pandemic up to 40% with staff decimated by casualties due to Covid, anxiety or depression
Anyone who has contacted their primary care center in Spain in recent months will have come across a bleak picture: telephone waits when it comes to making appointments, consultations that are granted for weeks or months after the request and Some toilets at the limit of their faculties. Primary Care, essential for the proper functioning of a country’s health system, is on the verge of collapse in Spain, as evidenced by reports from the Ministry of Health itself. The workload has increased by an average of 23.51% during the pandemic: in 2021, the health workers attended, in their ordinary activity, 453,023,901 consultations compared to 366,762,404 in 2019, according to data from the Information System of Primary Care (SIAP).
This growth in the number of tasks has not meant, on the other hand, a reinforcement of the templates; on the contrary, it has been assumed by decimated teams and subjected to more and more pressure. In 2021 there were 136 fewer family doctors in Spain than in 2019 (29,601 compared to 29,737) and 28 fewer paediatricians (6,474 compared to 6,502). And casualties due to Covid or due to anxiety or depression have ended up destroying any attempt to reach all the patients who requested a consultation. «The data is not real, it is worse, because the staff has never been complete. In fact, Primary Care doctors have had an average of 40% more work during the pandemic, ”says Lorenzo Armenteros, spokesman for the Spanish Society of General and Family Physicians (Semg). In this situation, he explains, “there are many difficulties in doing the job well.” «The professionals were burned and, not only that, we work with patients who were also burned because they feel that they were not being treated well. The panorama is dramatic, ”says this doctor, who does not believe that the situation, at least in the short term, will improve. “We are seeing how now there are many patients who return to attend consultations in person because they need affection and see their doctor again. The workload continues to be above 40% compared to before the pandemic.
According to data from the Ministry of Health, even worse than doctors, the group most affected by the saturation of Primary Care during the pandemic has been nursing. In these two years, there were only 395 more nurses (from 30,537 to 30,932), but in 2021 they had to take on the enormous task of vaccinating the entire Spanish population with two doses. That year they gave 84 million vaccines against Covid, which explains why they went from attending 132 million consultations in 2019 to 190 million in 2021. Their volume of work increased by 44%.
precarious conditions
Part of the staff moved to vaccination and, those who stayed, were forced to put aside many of the tasks they did before the pandemic, also working in precarious conditions.
Overloads and saturation in the centers of the Region
Primary Care professionals in the Region of Murcia have spent months denouncing the precarious situation in the Community. Only a day ago they raised their voices again to denounce their situation and highlight again “the historical and total abandonment of this level of care, essential to guarantee the accessible, multidisciplinary, coordinated and decisive care that Murcians need”. The result is “an overload of work of little value and useless, which saturates the services for which we are specialized and which have a direct impact on health care.”
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