Saturday, October 12, 2024, 00:26
«In terms of numbers, it doesn’t make sense. According to the numbers of the Andalusian Health Service, the Poniente University Hospital has 295,530 inhabitants in its area of influence and the Torrecárdenas University Hospital, including El Toyo, has 315,022 and Costa del Sol, which is another health agency that has left it at level 2, which “It would be a specialty hospital, it has 410,788 inhabitants in its area of influence, with practically the same staff as in El Poniente and, however, they attend to about 30,500 fewer emergencies than we do per year.” This is said by the head of the Medical Union in Poniente, Osorio Rodríguez, using the data that appears on the transparency portal of the Ministry of Health and Consumer Affairs of the Government of Andalusia corresponding to the 2023 financial year.
«The numbers don’t add up. If you compare the Poniente University Hospital with any regional hospital in Andalusia and none of them comes close either in number of emergencies, or in population in its area of influence, or in staff,” he warns.
From the Medical Union they are very clear when it comes to taking an x-ray of the situation. «All the health agency hospitals have been integrated into other sites, they have been absorbed by other centers and two remained, which were Costa del Sol and Poniente. They have put the Costa del Sol at level 2 and have given it more leadership than Torrecárdenas, and they have moved the Hospital de Poniente to level 3 and cut it from all sides.
And these cuts translate, to give a graphic example, into “the Poniente University Hospital going up because more and more new things and techniques were being done. The Tropical Medicine Unit, which is a reference at the European and national level, with publications and international conferences, has disappeared. It does not exist in the organizational chart of what they give us. The boss has not been paid as boss for a year because the Andalusian Health Service has decided that this does not exist. We at the Poniente University Hospital are a reference in tropical diseases due to the number of immigrants we have, all dengue fever, yellow fever, malaria, now Nile fever, and the unit that is in charge of that disappears. “They are going to leave it with a structure without any entity.”
In Rodríguez’s opinion, this is “a complete fait accompli policy. If we listen to the manager, even he finds out how things are going. To which he adds that it is “a directive that comes from Seville, where they have decided that we become a regional hospital and they take over the work of more than 30 years. From experience I can say that regional hospitals begin to lose doctors and staff becomes shorter and when this happens fewer things can be done and because they cannot do more things they are cut back.
This is going to cause “the portfolio of services in Poniente, if we are a regional one, to go down. Everything that we as a district cannot assume will have to be referred to Torrecárdenas or to a private concert, which represents a serious problem.
From the Medical Union they indicate that in Surgery, for example “in Huércal-Overa -Hospital Comarcal La Inmaculada- there are types of cancer that we do operate on in El Poniente and they do not and they refer them to Torrecárdenas. If they lower us to a regional level, theoretically we have to do the same, which will mean an overload for Torrecárdenas; The sick will have to go to Torrecárdenas to undergo surgery for many things that are now performed in the West. Whoever says that says that if there is no Pulmonology service, it will not be possible to do the things that were done before: tumor biopsies, bronchoscopies… we will have to see how we stay and depending on that, some things can be done and Others will have to be sent to Torrecárdenas.
Osorio Rodríguez clarifies that the head of Pulmonology continues to work as a specialist, but does not perform the functions of service manager that she had been performing. And like her, many other professionals who have seen their service disappear as such.
The dissolution of services threatens the loss of specialists
The reduction in the classification of the Poniente University Hospital, which, despite the fact that the Territorial Delegation of Health and Consumer Affairs alludes to the fact that it has always been a regional hospital so nothing will change in terms of typology, will lead, according to the sources consulted, the flight of professionals who until now are quite prestigious, such as those who make up the Tropical Medicine unit, where the Almeria center is a reference at the European level for the participation of its doctors in conferences and congresses of all kinds.
And the fact is that the Poniente University Hospital, although on paper it was conceived and classified as a regional hospital, its evolution has led it more to a specialty center almost at the level of Torrecárdenas himself and that now with the decision to eliminate services and leaving practically all of them in two, Internal Medicine and Surgery, causes their radius of medical action to diminish.
«If the hospital begins to go down in level, the doctors will go to other hospitals and in the end this will remain in the picture. “Things are ugly,” acknowledges the spokesperson for the Medical Union in Poniente, Osorio Rodríguez.
«Waiting lists are increasing, doctors are leaving for the private sector, because they pay better; The same patients are paid better for being operated on in the private sector than in the public one. If the waiting list is working poorly right now, those patients are referred to the private one, the private one lacks doctors to operate on those patients and the doctors prefer to leave the public one and go to the private one because they earn more money when they are the same patients. », he specifies.
But the worst of all is the feeling of uncertainty with which the different professionals are faced with this situation of change because “we don’t know what the staff is going to go through,” says Rodríguez.