The Minister of Health, Mónica García, has announced that her department is studying with other ministries “the self-justification of three-day sick leave so that those who have a mild illness do not go to the doctor for a sick leave report.” In this way, she clarifies in an interview on Onda Cero, that the citizen himself can self-justify a mild illness during the first three days and thus avoid the collapse of Primary Care doctors.
"It is inefficient to ask citizens not to go to primary care for a mild flu and, at the same time, force them to go to ask for proof of sick leave. The measure would mean the potential saving of hundreds of thousands of consultations a year and would collect a historic request from Primary Care professionals," say sources from the Ministry of Health.
A measure like this is already applied in the United Kingdom (7 days), Portugal (3), Sweden or Germany. Furthermore, something similar was done in Spain during the pandemic, although legally it was different due to the existence of the state of alarm.
The Secretary of State for Health, Javier Padilla, recalls that "this is a measure requested by scientific and professional societies in the field of Primary Care, many of them with unwavering commitment to the defense of public health. In this way, when a person cannot go to work due to mild respiratory symptoms, “this responsible declaration is enough and it is a demand from family doctors,” he points out in his X account.
Therefore, in the face of these symptoms, Mónica García recommends not going to work or doing so with a mask, since “you have to trust people's good judgment and, therefore, this responsible declaration measure is important so as not to infect others. of co-workers.”
However, he acknowledges that "it is being studied because it does not depend on this ministry alone, so we are looking at it with the Ministry of Social Security."
The current incidence of the flu is "a problem to deal with", since "its levels are at their highest intensity compared to recent years as we are in the first year that we are without the measures that were taken after the pandemic." Therefore, he added, this situation “is one to deal with and to convene an Interterritorial Council to make the best decisions.”
In fact, it clarifies that the role of the Ministry in the Interterritorial Council “is to coordinate, unify and ensure health.” In this regard, he wanted to differentiate between the flu that "comes every year" and the health collapse, since "in the last week of December, some communities began to collapse their health systems, so we decided to call this meeting to be proactive and put consensus on the table to take measures together because the flu is being very disparate depending on the territories.”
Regarding current vaccination rates, Mónica García acknowledged that “this year there has been lower vaccination coverage, since we are around 65%. This is one of the things we have to evaluate to start working next year.”
After the pandemic, he stated that “there have been fewer vaccination campaigns and less insistence. "We must also study whether the vaccines have generated the appropriate antibodies to the viruses that are in circulation."
