The Congress of Deputies has approved this Thursday the law that will serve to create the State Agency for Public Health (AESAP), a commitment dating from 2011 and that due to neglect or by the parliamentary situation has not been fulfilled so far. It has come out with the votes against PP, Junts and Vox in the Health Commission, which has full legislative competence, a procedure that allows the processing of the law without going through the plenary, last March.
The difference in the proportion of representativeness in the commission with respect to the plenary has allowed it to be approved with 19 votes in favor and 18 against, despite the fact that it has been the same forces that have been aligned in the yes and not to the creation of the AESAP.
The text will now have to go through the process of the Senate, from which the maximum of the Government has to approve its statute, which will profile what organs of the Administration will be integrated into it, how its director or the location of its headquarters will be chosen, which is not yet known.
It was revealed during the pandemic, when a meager department of the Ministry of Health (the Coordination Center for Health and Emergencies) had to take care of the collection of epidemiological data and its surveillance without sufficient equipment or infrastructure.
The new AESAP aims to strengthen the capabilities of the State to improve the health of the population, reduce inequalities and protect against health threats. With a “holistic and transdisciplinary” approach and under the principle of “one health” (which integrates the human, animal and planetary), the agency will act in coordination with autonomous communities and other administrations to monitor the state of health of the population and its determinants.
Its functions include information and public communication on risks, coordination with health crises and the reinforcement of regional services. In addition, it will offer technical and scientific advice, will promote innovation, research and public health training, and encourage cooperation between system actors. All this, “with special attention to the social determinants of health and social inequalities in health,” according to the law.
The 18 sanitary systems that govern Spain (the 17 Autonomic and Ceuta and Melilla, managed by the central government) have contributed agility to direct assistance to citizens, but has lost it to obtain a global vision of national trends. Collecting data from the health status of the population (except for the monitoring of the Carlos III Health Institute) is slow and not very efficient, something that the agency must solve, which each year must submit a report to Congress.
The AESAP will depend on the Ministry of Health, but it will be an autonomous body and its headline, Mónica García, has stated on several occasions that the address will be governed by a merit contest. “This is not a government position,” he said at the end of May. An amendment of the PP has added this premise to the law.
Votes against
In spite of this, and that in the previous processing in the Health Commission the PP had voted in favor, this time it has done it against. His spokesman, Elvira Velasco, has argued that government “is not credible.” “Spain is in a national emergency,” he said in reference to the case of corruption in which PSOE’s leaders have been involved. “This is a real fraud to citizens and only has one way out: convene elections.”
Velasco has defined the AESAP as a “necessary” tool. “But we arrive at this commission with some concern and skepticism. The government has proposed an agency without financing, money that is there to rise contracts,” the popular continued.
Vox, who has always opposed the agency, has argued that after the amendments of the nationalist and independentist parties he will not have competencies. “The agency was born vitiated from the beginning, with the objective distorted and away from the initial spirit. Everything that was coordination, which is for what was created, is completely erased from this law,” said deputy David García Gomis who, in any case, was going to vote against: “We will not support any law of a rotten and corrupt government to the marrow.”
With the opposite argument, Juns has rejected him, whose deputy Pilar Calvo has spoken of “competency invasion”, despite the fact that both his group and the PNV presented a fortnight of amendments that were added to the initial text so that the AEMPS does not usurpose autonomic functions.
The rest of the groups have voted in favor of a text that practically did not contain variations with respect to which it approved the same commission this year and was lying by surprise in the plenary. “It is a privilege to be able to talk about health, about health protection, coordinate, work together in the health of the population, talk about those studies that can be done in the agency of what influences citizens’ health, social determinants, where we live and how we transport ourselves,” said Alda Recas (add).
The groups have congratulated themselves for finally taking a project that has already been approved in previous legislatures, when the call of elections prevented the approval of the agency that provokes the support of all medical societies that work in public health.
The law has included an amendment not related to the AESAP, regarding animal health. The groups have agreed that within six months since the approval of the law, the Government articulates “the necessary formulas” for the availability of medicines, and “in particular antibiotics”, in pharmacies and other authorized dispenser centers, in accordance with the appropriate presentations for both prescribing veterinarians and for the owners of the animals.
