The Catalan public health has not yet recovered from 2010 cuts. To understand its current state, you have to go back to that time. The situation has improved slightly in recent years, but the budget of the Generalitat allocated to Health is practically the same as in 2008. Do your calculations: 14 years later, the ‘ministry’ that led the management of the covid-19 pandemic, which is not over yet, still has the same piece of the cake. This is reflected in: precarious employment contracts, lack of doctors and nurses and impossible working hours. The first year of Joseph Maria Argimon as Minister of Health has not reversed this situation, nor has it strengthened primary care, the gateway of the system.
The figure is provided by the Metges de Catalunya union. The budget for Health this 2022 is €11.2 billion, but from this number you have to subtract about 1,500 that will go to pay the ‘covid bill’. “We stayed at 9.7 billion. In 2019, it was 9.5 billion, the same as in 2018,” says the secretary general, Xavier Leonart.
Lleonart believes that Argimon has a “historic opportunity” to reconcile with the health personnel, but he thinks that, at the same time, “he is on the way to wasting it”. “We ask that our Labor conditions those of neighboring countries. It was approved by a majority in Parliament. If the Government does not do it, the credit will be zero “, he says.
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Family doctors, who within healthcare have been the ones who have borne the most weight of the pandemic, they criticize that Salut, far from having increased the workforce of primary care centers (CAP), has hired “psychologists and nutritionists”, instead of “doctors and nurses”. “Psychologists are not even clinicians, so we are very skeptical,” says Antoni Sisó, president of the Catalan Society of Family and Community Medicine (Camfic).
Camfic denounces the precariousness of the CAPs, which has not been reversed, and calls for a primary care law that guarantees universality and financing.