The Government’s announcement to make permanent 67,300 Health professionals, which accumulated temporary contracts for years, is one of the most necessary measures to end precariousness in a sector, the health sector, whose effort was essential to face the covid-19 pandemic and that is essential for the improvement of our welfare system. This measure, which comes imposed by Brussels within the labor stabilization plan in the public sector, it is not enough, however, to alleviate the deficits of the Spanish public health, that continues to require many more professionals than those currently hired to meet the needs of the population. But, welcome is it to give employment stability to those tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and other health professionals, who need, even more than other professions, security in the exercise of their work and due recognition, also salary, to their work.
In a journalistic interview in which he announced the decree approved yesterday, the President of the Government assured that they had agreed with the autonomous communities common criteria for this decision. However, the measure, which must be applied by each autonomy within the scope of its powers, has caused suspicion among the governments of the communities, because the coordination advanced by Pedro Sánchez does not seem to be such, to the point that communities, such as that of Madrid They assure that the Government has not discussed it with them. In the communities, Sánchez is reproached for wanting to add to the credit of the central Executive the amount of an initiative that some autonomies were already agreeing with the trade union centrals in its territorial scope.
We would be facing another case of disregard, probably the product of the rush of the Government to announce the initiative after the electoral fiasco of the left in the Andalusian elections. This need to recover positions not only does not justify appropriating powers that have been transferred, but also adds frivolity to the way of dealing with such a serious issue as the extremely precarious situation of health workers in the public system, which exceeds 40% temporality. And this is not a problem that should be approached from frivolity, nor that can be improvised, much less that can be decided behind the backs of the communities. It is necessary, however, to coordinate with them to avoid, for example, that the temporality is prolonged in some territories while it is corrected in others. From the experience of the pandemic itself, the Government should have drawn the lesson that one cannot govern without the communities or against the communities. Quite the contrary, the structure of the State requires co-governance, so vaunted when after the confinement it was left to the communities to decide on curfews, perimeter confinements or hotel opening hours, but forgotten on so many other occasions.
At this time when Sánchez is trying to set the political agenda against the Feijóo effect, which makes the PP the winner in all the polls, The president must be especially careful to maintain a good collaboration with the communities, whether they are governed by the PSOE, the PP or by nationalist parties. Underestimating the autonomies will not allow it to grow in those territories, it will simply earn the animosity of the regional executives who feel their powers have been invaded and are, at the very least, questioned in their management.