The Ombudsman’s ‘Annual Report 2022’ includes some of the most serious waiting list cases that took place over the past year. In the Region of Murcia, it highlights the 14 months to receive rehabilitation treatment at the Virgen del Castillo de Yecla Hospital or the four months to receive rehabilitation treatment at the El Carmen Health Center, in Murcia, among others.
In his document, published this Monday, the Ombudsman details that the number of complaints received by waiting lists to receive specialized assistance (outpatient consultations, diagnostic tests and surgical interventions) “has continued to increase significantly in 2022.” Therefore, they detailed some of the situations of delay for consultation or diagnostic test that were the object of action by the Ombudsman. In the first place, the two and a half years for a consultation in the Pain Unit of the Ramón y Cajal University Hospital (Madrid) stand out. In second position are the 22 months for rescheduling a trauma consultation at the Inocencio Jiménez Specialties Medical Center (Zaragoza).
In the case of the El Carmen Health Center, the Ombudsman explains that the Murcia Ministry of Health assumed that “the care logic requires prioritizing patients referred to rehabilitation.” This file of the Ombudsman was closed “once the Administration reported the hiring of a rehabilitator in the corresponding service.”
The entity led by Ángel Gabilondo explains that the date of some of the appointments for patients included on the waiting list “has been brought forward throughout the processing of the respective complaint, once the health administrations have been able to verify any variation in the clinical evolution of the users who so advised, or have restructured the appointment schedules after reinforcing the endowment of the staff, or have solved other temporary management difficulties.
In other cases, however, they regret that the health services “have maintained the long waiting periods, indicating that the established period was appropriate to the clinical situation of the patient, or alleging the impossibility of having specialists who could reduce the delay” . Likewise, the Ombudsman denounces that the delay in providing health care “has sometimes been increased by the channeling of the request for diagnostic tests through hospital centers other than the patient’s reference hospital.”
“Lack of material and personal resources”
The Ombudsman also received complaints about “deficiencies in terms of staffing or equipment in both health centers.” In addition, the report dedicates a section to patient safety. In this case, it echoes a news story about alleged bad practices in the field of plastic, cosmetic and reconstructive surgery in Murcia.
In line, the Ombudsman warns that “there are an increasing number of centers in which techniques and procedures are applied without there being any certainty as to whether they are carried out with the due guarantees and quality.” For this reason, the entity requested “information” from the Murcian administration on the result of the inspection and control work carried out in privately owned centers that practice the aforementioned surgical activity.
The Ombudsman recalls that, as provided by the General Health Law, public and private activities that may have negative consequences for health “will be subjected by the competent bodies to preventive limitations of an administrative nature, which must also control advertising related to with health.”
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