Doctors will extend their afternoon hours in Alicante health centers to offer more appointments

The Ministry of Health is preparing major changes in Primary Care. Health centers are normally the gateway that citizens have to health care, which is why they are where the greatest collapse of care can occur.

In this sense, Health has proposed a reorganization of doctors’ work hours in order to expand the availability of scheduled appointments. This change implies that – by 2025 – primary care doctors will extend their regular working hours from Monday to Friday in order to increase the availability of scheduled appointments. Something that the Administration intends to achieve by excluding Saturdays from the regular working hours of the Primary Care teams, thus limiting those days to continuous care on-call, “with the corresponding complementary remuneration,” the ministry adds in a press release.

The Minister of Health, Marciano Gómez, has explained that Primary Care health personnel work an average of 8 Saturdays a year to complete the annual calculation of the ordinary day, so that those hours currently worked on Saturdays would be compensated in days in the afternoon from Monday to Friday, “thus increasing the availability of appointments on the agenda on those days.” On the other hand, on Saturdays they would be paid as guards from 8 a.m. and not from 3 p.m. as until now.

«The purpose of this proposal, which will be presented at the sectoral table, is to adjust to reality the service provided by primary school professionals on Saturdays, since emergencies are attended to and not scheduled consultations, so we understand that those days must be considered. as guards for all purposes, and not as part of the ordinary day,” the councilor specified.

Changes that do not imply a reduction in working hours

Likewise, it has indicated that it would be a reorganization of the working day that does not imply a reduction in the current annual working day, whose reduction for all health center personnel will be implemented in the terms provided in the Agreement of the General Negotiation Table for civil servant personnel. statutory and labor law of the Generalitat.

Marciano Gómez has held a meeting with the directors of Primary Care of the health departments of the Valencian Community, as well as with the managers of the Interdepartmental Health Groups, in which the implementation of “a comprehensive plan for the improvement of Primary Care, which contemplates measures such as the aforementioned reorganization of the ordinary day, among others, and includes the preparation of the draft decree on the structure, organization and operation of primary and community care of the Valencian Health System.

Appointment management with AI

Within the framework of this comprehensive plan, the Minister of Health explained that “work is also being done on a single agenda model for each Primary Care professional, with the aim of homogenizing, unifying and systematizing processes that allow the implementation of shared management of demand and optimize appointment management with the support of artificial intelligence (AI).

From the rounds of contacts with professional associations, scientific societies and representatives of the groups involved, Health assures that the configuration of the agendas “is not reflected in the recorded average delay times to be attended to, since many times despite not “With appointments available on the agenda within a certain period of time, patients who requested to be seen earlier were attended to in a much shorter time, without this circumstance being reflected.”

They add that this circumstance is combined with the fact that patients warn that 52% of calls in some health centers are not answered, and that the data show that “the average delay times that emerge from the current agenda structures “They are superior and do not correspond to those of the actual resolution of queries,” the counselor specified.

Creation of service headquarters

Gómez has stated that the new model of Primary and Community Care that the Ministry of Health plans to implement proposes a new hierarchical structure for health personnel that is comparable to that of Hospital Care. To this end, it is planned to create the Primary and Community Care care service heads and the Primary and Community Care section heads, with the aim of giving prestige to Primary Care and its professionals.

As Marciano Gómez has indicated, “the role of these professionals will be key to evaluating the demand for care and establishing the necessary mechanisms to avoid delays in the different Primary Care services.”

Furthermore, “the new structure will allow the size of the work teams, since it will enable the professional promotion of staff, which will make the specialty of Family and Community Medicine, as well as Pediatrics, Primary Care Team more attractive,” added the counselor On the other hand, the draft Decree also contemplates the creation of the new professional category of Primary and Community Care health auxiliary personnel.

Shared demand management

The new model contemplates the implementation of shared demand management procedures, which consists of identifying the patient’s real need and channeling it to the most efficient Primary and Community Care team professional for resolution in accordance with their competencies, with the least delay and the greatest possible resolution.

To this end, the new service and section heads will be responsible for implementing the appointment circuits, monitoring difficulties in accessing services, supervising the shared management circuits and the agendas.

The Minister has indicated that the purpose of this model “is to offer the patient a quality care response in the shortest possible time and in the most efficient way, also guaranteeing equitable access of people to all the health services of the Valencian health system.” .