The pressure of the White Tides in defense of public health, the pressure exerted by the opposition in the Parliament of Andalusia due to the deficits detected in health care and the long waiting lists are claiming their first victims today. For “personal reasons”, according to sources from the Ministry of Health, the vice-minister of the branch, Miguel Ángel Guzmán, and the manager of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS), Diego Vargas, resigned this morning. María Luisa del Moral, PP Health spokesperson in the Congress of Deputies, and Valle García, managing director of the Reina Sofía Hospital in Córdoba, will be the people in charge of occupying these positions.
Despite the insistence of Minister Catalina García to affirm that public health is better today than it was a few years ago, the truth is that there are currently one million citizens of the region waiting to be treated in an outpatient clinic by a specialist ( more than 840,000 patients) or to undergo surgery (more than 200,000 people), data that generated great controversy when they were published and that has become a weapon thrown by the opposition towards the popular government team, led by Juanma Moreno.
According to Juan Espadas, leader of the PSOE-A, the health situation, after a “disastrous management” of the PP, is “probably generating one of the most serious problems from the political point of view of the Junta de Andalucía in our land”.
Despite García’s insistence on pointing out that current healthcare is better than that of just a few years ago, the truth is that waiting lists last forever due to lack of public resources. Few staff and overloaded work mean that an Andalusian takes on average 139 days to undergo surgery and 121 days to be treated in an outpatient clinic, data above the national average. One million citizens now add to the list and the situation is so critical that even Moreno Bonilla himself had to recognize that there was a serious problem in this area.
For this reason, the department is being the target of important restructuring changes. These departures would respond to the new needs of Catalina García, and would be added to the resignation in September of Luis Martínez Hervás, who left the direction of Health Assistance of the SAS. Miguel Ángel Guzmán was named number two in 2022 by the current counselor, but since 2019, with the arrival of the PP to the Government, he had been manager of the SAS, appointed by Jesús Aguirre, the previous counselor. For his part, Diego Vargas was appointed in August 2022 after having been general director of Health Assistance since 2019.
The management that the popular ones are doing in health matters has achieved the rejection of all the opposition spokespersons. Echoing the discomfort of patients and health personnel who have joined together in several demonstrations in recent months, politicians have been focusing on the deterioration that, in their opinion, health care is suffering, something that was evident last time. week in the State of the Community Debate.
Today, after learning of the resignation of both officials in the sector, the leader of Andalusian socialism was the first to speak out. Their departures, it has been, “clearly demonstrate what we have unfortunately been denouncing for a year and a half from the Socialist Parliamentary Group” in the Andalusian Chamber and also “in Andalusia as a whole, practically in the eight provinces through citizen platforms, patients, of mayors who join the demands and complaints of their neighbors in relation to primary care” and “with the growth of waiting lists” for both surgery and specialists.
Espadas has thus spoken of “a disastrous situation of public health management in Andalusia”, and has stressed that to the aforementioned resignations we must add another “nine” previous resignations that “have occurred at practically all levels.” “A year ago, with the hand-made awards, without any type of procedure, of transfers of resources from the public budget to private healthcare, it was just the tip of the iceberg that is clearly demonstrating the inability to manage the public” on the part of the Board and to “invest in health professionals”, as well as “the clear transfer” of resources to private health “as a political strategy of the Popular Party”, as has been stated.
The general secretary of the PSOE-A has asserted that it is a “very serious” matter that “must be clearly demanded and vindicated by the Andalusians”, and has accused the PP-A Government of being “probably generating one of the most serious problems from the political point of view of the Junta de Andalucía in our land”.
“It is not a problem of names but of the neoliberal model of the PP and its obsession with increasing the business figures of private clinics,” commented Toni Valero, Sumar’s deputy in Congress after this news was made known. It is the result of the “failure of the Government and its model”, that it decides to “derive resources to private health” while “the waiting list and saturation in primary care mark figures with few precedents in Andalusia”, he has saying.
For her part, Inmaculada Nieto, leader of Por Andalucía, expressed herself along the same lines upon learning of the departure of both officials. This “does not augur the recovery of a path of sanity” of the PP, he commented, since the “problem lies with the model, determined to give money to private clinics, which are not treating our health personnel well” nor putting the patient at ease. in the middle”. “The problem, in capital letters, is called the Popular Party of Andalusia,” she assessed.