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The million dollar question: where will the doctors of the new Ayuso hospital come from?

2020-10-27T22:06:15.501Z


There are only five days until the end of the work and it is still a mystery what the Community of Madrid will do to cover the workforce


Time is ticking and the enigma about the staff of the new hospital for the pandemic in Madrid continues.

The Community receives the key to the construction companies this Saturday but by late Monday no one had yet revealed where the toilets will come from.

We do know that the hospital will open one day in November: “We finish the work on October 31, we put in beds and equipment that we already have ready in a few days and there we finish the infrastructure and the healthcare part starts.

Days ”, responds the general director of Sanitary Infrastructures, Alejo Miranda de Larra.

But the question about the staff is not known by President Isabel Díaz Ayuso even though she has been fully involved in the

hospital's

marketing

: she made the announcement and took the photo on June 8, she returned to work the month next and again visited her last Friday.

This Sunday in an interview on Telemadrid, he said that the staff will be made up of health workers from other hospitals, but did not go into details because, he added, she is not responsible for human resources at the Ministry of Health.

"The feat of building in just three months (there are four actually) a hospital that is going to surprise the world is what I must occupy," she explained.

According to Ayuso, the person who has "the fine print" that is not her concern is the general director of human resources.

That position is held by Raquel Sampedro, who despite criticism of the president for evading the issue, did not show up on Monday to report on her personnel plan for the hospital and thus cover this clamorous information gap.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Health on Monday declined a request from this newspaper to interview Sampedro and referred to statements by the counselor Enrique Ruiz Escudero in which he still does not specify such basic things as how much staff the new center will have or what specialties they will occupy.

"What we want is that hospital staff who already know well how this hospital works, since it is a totally different hospitalization model, will be able to activate and carry out a complementary activity," said Escudero on Antena 3 according to words collected by the Europa Press agency.

"At the same time, it will also be reinforced in those hospitals where these personnel come from."

Sampedro could unveil his human resources plan this Wednesday at the health sector table, the monthly meeting with the five largest medical unions.

But during the four months of construction, it has repeatedly avoided the question of the union representatives.

This Monday they received the order of business for the Wednesday meeting at 12:00 and finally the Community has included a point called "information about the Isabel Zendal hospital."

This is the name of this new center that has the name of the Spanish nurse who is considered to be the first to take part in an international humanitarian mission.

They fear that Ayuso's project will involve undressing a saint to dress another, the same thing that happened while he operated the Ifema field hospital during the spring.

Now Madrid faces a less overwhelming but more constant second wave that is exhausting its doctors and nurses.

They wonder if another service could be undermined by the new hospital.

The opening of the Ifema led to the closure of the 37 emergency services of the primary care centers.

They are still closed more than seven months later.

The problem of the Community is that it has been struggling for months to find toilets to reinforce a public health system whose seams have been seen during the pandemic.

The unions criticize that Madrid residents are now paying more than ever for the consequences of the years of cuts.

The president defends herself by saying that there is a shortage of doctors in Spain but the unions say that during the pandemic there has been an exodus of health workers to other communities that pay better.

The Madrid Health Service (Sermas) job boards had tens of thousands of candidates before the pandemic, but the regional government has only recruited 7,869 new health workers.

Sermas has gone from 73,815 professionals in February, including management personnel, to 81,684 as of September 30.

A key unknown is knowing the size of the new hospital's staff.

It will have more than 1,000 hospital beds, 48 ​​for ICU and critics.

It is a capacity similar to that of the Ifema field hospital.

That will make it one of the largest hospitals in the Community.

The Hospital de la Paz has a few more beds and more than 6,700 employees.

But the Isabel Zendal will need less staff because it is not that complex.

It is a monographic hospital, which in principle according to the Community will for now be entirely dedicated to the treatment of covid-19.

The Community has said that the reorganization will be voluntary but the unions doubt that the fixed toilets will accept their transfer easily.

But of course what is not going to happen is the ridiculousness of the hospital opening its doors in November without staff, according to the unions.

The regional government has several options to save face.

One is to hire new doctors who do not meet the usual requirements of the law, thanks to the authorization approved in a royal decree of September 29, which was opposed by the Popular Party of Ayuso.

Communities can now recruit non-community or non-community health workers.

The Community can also resort to what Amyts calls the “militarization” of personnel: the forced transfer of health workers.

It is another option contemplated in this new rule.

Healthcare workers throughout Spain have been protesting for weeks against these two reforms because, they understand, they make the medical profession precarious.

But the most likely way out is to send Isabel Zendal apart from the almost 8,000 reinforcements of the pandemic eventually hired.

They have less capacity to object.

"When you are temporary, you should obey so that they keep calling you," says Julián Ordóñez, health spokesman for UGT Madrid.

Julián Ezquerra, general secretary of the Amyts medical union, sees it that way: “They are the weakest and out of fear they will be 'forced volunteers'”.

Information about the coronavirus

- Here you can follow the last hour on the evolution of the pandemic

- This is how the coronavirus curve evolves in Spain and in each autonomy

- Questions and answers about the coronavirus

- Guide to action against the disease

- In case of having symptoms, these are the telephones that have been enabled in each community

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-10-27

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