The public-led group, Plataforma por la Sanidad 100×100 Pública, which focuses on improving healthcare facilities for local residents, has proposed 33 improvements which they feel are required to bring healthcare back to an acceptable standard.
Following continual protests and threats of escalation, the group had a meeting with the hospital management responsible for the area, in which they suggested, amongst other things, the construction of a new hospital, and a new medical centre to serve the Orihuela Costa.
Hospital area manager, José Cano, met with the platform’s spokesperson, Manuel Gómez, both of whom assessed the meeting as “positive”.
At the meeting, the manager shared the data provided by the health department’s latest report which shows that there is a gap between health resources and population growth. “While the population has doubled, the resources and services made available to the population are the same as 18 years ago.”
Gómez pointed out that urgent matters are being prioritised due to the lack of resources. Access to specialist consultation is for very serious clinical cases (cancer), serious (serious limitations to the patient’s autonomy) and less serious clinical cases. In the hospitalisation of patients and in surgical operations, urgent admissions or operations predominate, on average higher than other departments.
Likewise, they call the waiting time in the emergency room for hospitalisation “unacceptable.” “The lack of a pathological anatomy laboratory here, the ‘overbooking’ of bed occupancy or the existence of a clinical data system incompatible with that of the Ministry, gives clues to the causes of these long stays in the pits.”
To partially address these problems, they have requested an investment in infrastructure. They demand the reform of the health centres of San Miguel de Salinas, Los Montesinos, Guardamar and, above all, Torrevieja (La Loma II) and, in Orihuela Costa, the construction of the second health centre, as well as that the hospital expand its capacity with new consultations, more operating rooms and more beds and that the construction of a second hospital is planned in the medium term.
Likewise, the platform, says Gómez, misses that there is “greater fluidity in communication and information between Management and this platform and that the departmental Health Council is created as an institutional bridge channel between all sectors affected by health issues: professionals, managers, users and public institutions.
