There will be no expansion of the Aguamarina health centre, the only facility that currently serves Orihuela Costa’s 30,000 + residents. The project, inherited from the previous PSOE government, is not among the priorities of the PP-Vox coalition.
According to Irene Celdrán, the Councillor for Health, the commitment of the current council is for the construction of a second health centre in a totally different location from that currently positioned between Cabo Roig and Campoamor.
This was confirmed by the councillor during the ordinary plenary session last Thursday in response to a motion presented by the PSOE, that was rejected with the votes of PP and Vox.
The Socialist councillor, and former head of the municipal Health area, Luis Quesada, stated that he had already made all the preparations to carry out the transfer to Valencia of a plot of land attached to the Aguamarina health centre that residents and market traders currently use as a parking lot. Even the previous Consell President, Ximo Puig announced, that the drafting of the project would go out to tender last May, although it was a commitment that he failed to meet.
Councilor Celdrán said that she is very much against this project, arguing that it is not the right location and highlighting that the implementation of this measure would generate a problem with parking in the surrounds of the medical centre next summer.
She recognised that the current medical facility in Aguamarina is already “too small” and that “we all agree that it is necessary to enlarge the health system on the coast.” In her speech she also criticised the PSOE which, despite having an autonomous community government presided over by the same political party, did not fight for a second health centre. “They have been governing for eight years in Valencia and one in Orihuela,” she said of the socialists.
In his reply, Luis Quesada defended his management stating that, in his 14 months in government, he had three meetings with the Ministry on this matter and in all of them he was told that Orihuela Costa did not meet the minimum requirements of a second medical facility.
If that second centre had been built, he said, “there is only one similar precedent in Madrid at the national level.” He warned Celdrán that the only way for the current government to achieve its goals would be because the Ministry will have changed its criteria. “If we do not continue with the planning for an extension that I put in place, we will go through an entire legislature, at the end of which we will still not have achieved the necessary improvements of either an extension or of a second health centre.”
Cambiemos also considered it necessary to build a second health centre stating that the criteria set by the Department of Health does not correspond to the reality of Orihuela Costa. Although Valencia considers that the coast does not have enough registered inhabitants to have a second health centre, the reality is, according to councillor Leticia Pertegal, a large part of the resident population is not registered, and that is not to mention the large floating population that has its second summer residence on the coast of Orihuela.
Ciudadanos, in turn, took the opportunity to highlight that the PP, during the mandate of former mayor Emilio Bascuñana, already announced that it had a plot that it was going to give to the Ministry to build this supposed second health centre on the coast. The proposed site was located in the La Ciñuelica urbanisation, but this transfer of land was never carried out. In the opinion of the Ciudadanos spokesperson, José Aix, the PP only sought to put pressure on the Generalitat, which was then immersed in the reversion of the Torrevieja health authority bringing it back from private into public management.
Image: In 2020 the former mayor Emilio Bascuñana made the land available to Ribera Salud on the promise of building a second health centre for the coast at a cost of 6 million euro
