Thousands of doctors went on strike today throughout Spain to demand their own status, different from the general one that the Ministry of Health has agreed with the majority health unions. In the third strike of the doctors, which lasts Wednesday and Thursday, they demand all the competent administrations – especially the ministry and the communities -, with the guard system as one of the main workhorses.
The strike has been called by the Professional Group for a Medical and Facultative Statute (APEMYF), made up of 16 medical organizations from all over Spain, which do not include the two unions that had organized the previous two: the State Confederation of Medical Unions (CESM) and the Andalusian Medical Union (SMA). These entities could also be even undefined.
There is still no data on the follow-up of the strike, but it seems to be very uneven, as has happened with previous strikes and from what EL PAÍS journalists have been able to verify in several cities in Spain.
There are services in which there is no condition, since none of the professionals support the strike, and others in which appointments have to be cancelled. In any case, minimum services always guarantee the most urgent attention.
Gonzalo López Peña, a thoracic surgery resident at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid, says that his service has not wanted to stop surgical activity. “No one has prevented us from going on strike, but we have decided to come, although we respect the demand.” The resident, who has been in this hospital for three years, assures: “Changing the 24-hour guards is our priority.”
The Clinical Hospital of Valencia breathes a certain tranquility during the day of the provincial doctors’ strike this Wednesday. “I didn’t even know about it,” says a physiotherapist who is having coffee on a terrace in front of the hospital. Inside a cafeteria, three pathology doctors talk. “The strike is necessary. We have to unite. There is a lack of medical corporatism. The conditions are so precarious that they don’t even let us think,” says one of the doctors.
“It is very difficult to go on strike in pathological anatomy because the day you don’t come, you will have to manage that task. Since there are so few of us and we are at capacity, it would fall on our colleagues. But we support the protests,” he adds.
Several demonstrations have taken place to give visibility to the strike. One in Madrid left this morning from the Congress of Deputies towards the Ministry of Health with about 300 or 400 people, according to the police.
Between banners with slogans such as “The minister mistreats doctors”, “Adequate statute for doctors” or “More gowns, less ties”, and choruses that say “24 without stopping you can’t work.”
Cristian Vale, a 34-year-old doctor at the Las Panaderas health center in Fuenlabrada, participates in the demonstration called by Amyts. He has come because he believes that doctors are not sufficiently represented at the negotiating table for the framework statute. In his opinion, they are a minority group within the health system and he believes that other more represented categories are deciding on the conditions for everyone. “We are a minority sector in volume within healthcare and others decide what we have to do,” he laments.
Vale defends the need for specific regulations for doctors. It considers it insufficient that the framework statute treats groups with very different responsibilities in a homogeneous manner. “If the minister [] “It creates its own section for doctors, although it does not want to call it its own statute, in practice it is the same,” he points out, but demands that it be legislated in accordance with their obligations, which, according to him, are not comparable to those of other health professionals.
In Barcelona, a rally has been called in the Plaza de Sant Jaume, in front of the Palau de la Generalitat. There was Alex Ternianov, a primary care doctor, of Bulgarian origin, who has been practicing in Spain for 18 years. “I have seen the privatization of public health in my country and I did not want that to happen here,” he explained. Ternianov sees more than 40 patients a day in a primary care center and emphasizes that the time allocated to each consultation makes adequate care difficult: “I understand patients, it is impossible to understand their problems in five minutes.”
