24 hour guards health care are the subject of constant debate among health professionals. This Tuesday, More Country has registered in the Congress of Deputies, an initiative that advocates the suppression of this type of prolonged shifts and urges that the Interterritorial Council of the National Health System (of which the Ministry of Health and the autonomous communities are part) carry out a study that collects the needs of professionalsthe necessary improvements in its management and organizational changes necessary to plan the suppression of continuous shifts.
As explained at a press conference by the leader of Más País, Íñigo Errejón, the initiative that was presented this Tuesday “drinks” from another registered in the Madrid Assembly last week in the same direction. “The 24-hour shifts in the health system are a risk to the health of professionals and a possible source of security problems and mistakes with patients; it is necessary to abandon this practice, changing the way of organizing the system and planning the needs for it” defended then the spokesman for Health of Más Madrid, Javier Padilla.
Working long shifts is a frequent phenomenon, especially prevalent among doctors, points out the political formation
Today, in Congress, Errejón cited countries where, like Finland o France, the 24-hour guards have already been eliminated. A deletion that, he indicated, represents a double improvement: for the quality of life of health workers and, also, for better patient care. In the explanatory statement of the non-law proposition registered by Más País, it is indicated that in Spain, carrying out long shifts “It is a frequent phenomenon existing in different professional categories, being especially prevalent in the professional category of male and female doctors”.
The political formation admits that, in recent decades, there have been “significant advances in relation to the periods continued rest and the discharge of the outgoing guard”, but, they warn “the focus has hardly been placed on moving towards a horizon of suppression of continuous 24-hour shifts”.
This type of shift, they add, is associated with “worse clinical performance, an increase in patient safety incidents and worse health in the professionals who perform them, although the evidence is of different strength in each of these aspects” . Thus, they quote the National Academy of Medicineof the United States, which, in 2008, recommended that medical residents not work more than 16 hours continuously.
shorter shifts
More Country recalls that long working hours are related to sleep disorders, physical exhaustion, an increase in the number of diagnoses of anxiety or depression, as well as an increase in the consumption of psychotropic drugs, an increase in cardiovascular events, problems in achieving pregnancy and an increased risk of miscarriage or low birth weight.
The political formation urges the Government to prepare, within the Interterritorial Council, a study that collects the needs of professionals
In this sense, they consider that the way of organizing the different centres, services and units “will have to adapt to the characteristics of the work carried out in them, the type of assistance provided and other elements related to the workload and the type of professionals who work in them, but the data on the health of the professionals and the possibility that it results in a worse quality of the care provided and a greater number of errors must suppose sufficient incentive for health services to consider how to minimize the use of 24 hour shifts in its workers, moving towards a future in which they are not needed”
In this line, the political group urges the Government to prepare, within the Interterritorial Council, a study that includes the needs of professionalsthe necessary improvements in its management and the organizational changes necessary to plan the abolition of continuous 24-hour shifts and initiate the procedures to eliminate in the medium term this type of long shifts.
Until its disappearance, Más País suggests that they be counted as hours of effective work
Until its disappearance, Más País suggests that these guards be accounted for as hours of actual work for all purposes and that, in the aforementioned study, budget needs to carry out the proposed measures and that the obligation to public institutions to guarantee the right to a certain period of uninterrupted rest for workers.
Survey among doctors
Precisely at the beginning of May, the General Council of Physicians (CGCOM), through the national section of Young Doctors and Employment Promotion, launched a project to know the current reality of the workload that the medical shifts entail and the compliance that occurs in relation to their subsequent compensatory rest.
The survey aims to perform ua current x-ray that allows the analysis of the situation of compensatory breaks after medical shifts in Spain for residents. In addition, the second objective of this project is to know the possible differences in the conditions of each autonomous community. With all the information obtained, a report will be prepared that will be presented to the corresponding administrations, with which they intend “to reflect and act accordingly”.