The Superior Court of Xustiza of Galicia (TSXG) has revoked the ruling of a Contentious-Administrative court that declared the dismissal of the head of the otorhinolaryngology service of the Santiago University Hospital Complex (CHUS) to be contrary to law. Carlos Martin. The magistrates, unlike the first instance judge, consider that his dismissal was justified and based on his aggressive behavior and the humiliating treatment he gave to his subordinates.
The judges of the first section of the Contentious Chamber of the TSXG also reproach the management of the Santiago health area, which at that time was directed by Eloína Núñez Masid, cousin of Alberto Núñez Feijóohaving kept Martín in his position for years. In fact, they criticize that did not comply with the law which required management to ensure that the service chief’s performance of the position was periodically evaluated.
The conflict between the head of ENT specialists and the majority of doctors in his department led to a nine-month strike three years ago, one of the longest in memory in Galician healthcare and which shot up the waiting lists to levels that still persist today. .
Martín was appointed in 2016, a year before the arrival of Núñez Masid to the management of Santiago from that of Ourense, through the collegiate evaluation procedure, which obliges the Health Administration to evaluate his work every four years, and to revoke him from the position in the event that the result of that evaluation is negative. The management of Núñez Masid never opened this process, despite the fact that I knew the service problems.
Verbal violence and humiliation
In June 2021, the ENT doctors wrote to her to inform her that Martín repeatedly showed “an authoritarian and violent attitude,” the sentence recalls, with “verbal violence with screamseven in public and with patients in front, repeated harassment to several members of the service, questioning their professional and even personal worth, and physical violencelike violently grabbing a female doctor from the service, causing a bruise on her arm.”
Núñez Masid did not pay attention to the complaints nor took any action, which led five months later to the ENT doctors to begin a strike that, according to the judges, “produced a significant deterioration in healthcare activity”: more than 3,642 patients waiting for their first consultation, with an average delay of more than 98 days. User complaints multiplied by four and went from less than 150 in the first half of 2021 to almost a thousand in the same period of 2022.
In September of that year, the ENT doctors put an end to the protest after the Xunta forced Núñez Masid to resolve the conflict and create a commission to study their complaints. On the conclusions of that committee, Sergas based the decision to first suspend two months for serious misconduct and later dismiss Martínthat is, more than a year after the ENT doctors warned the manager in writing of the point at which the situation had reached.
“It is inexplicable”, adds the sentence, dated last October 15 but which has not emerged until now, “that the aforementioned evaluation has not been carried out [del desempeño del cargo del jefe de servicio de otorrinos]which could have been avoided […] all the subsequent problems.” That is, the strike and the deterioration of healthcare capacity of the service that led to chaos in the department.
According to the latest Sergas data, referring to June of this year, waiting lists for an otorhinolaryngology consultation in Santiago are the highest of the hospitals in Galicia: 55.9 days, that is, 20 days more than in A Coruña, 26 more than in Ferrol, 21 more than in Ourense and 12 more than in Vigo.
Sergas dismissed Núñez Masid last May, although Feijoó’s successor in the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, has replaced her by appointing her to a senior position in the Ministry of Social Policy. This summer, Public He revealed that just before his dismissal he had processed two tenders that awarded as many contracts for more than 4 million euros to the Eulen Group, the company whose director for Galicia is his cousin Micaela Núñez Feijóo, sister of the president of the PP. In addition, he inflated the contract by more than 600,000 euros.
This newspaper also revealed that after her cousin Alberto appointed her manager of the Ourense hospitals, she created a position that did not exist in her hospital to assign it to her own husband, Francisco José Aramburu Vilariño.
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