Doctors go on strike throughout Spain

Medical and faculty professionals throughout Spain are called to strike this week to show their rejection of the Framework Statute promoted by the Ministry of Healthwhich has the approval of several unions for its approval, and demand your own text for the group, which recognizes its particularities and work responsibility.

The strikes are planned between this Monday and Friday, as announced by the Strike Committee, formed by the Spanish Confederation of Medical Unions (CESM), the Andalusian Medical Union (SMA), Metges of Catalonia (MC), the Association of Doctors and Higher Graduates of Madrid (AMYTS), the Euskadi Medical Union (SME) and the Union of Independent Practitioners of Galicia (OMEGA).

It is about the first coordinated action of these organizationswho have been expressing their discomfort for some time about the direction that the Framework Statute was taking, the norm that regulates the working conditions of professionals in the National Health System (SNS), which the Ministry of Health and the unions of the Negotiation Area have been negotiating for the last three years.

On January 26, Health and the unions SATSE-FSES, FSS-CCOO, UGT and CSIF announced that they had reached an agreement to approve the text of the draft Framework Statute law, which must now go through the Council of Ministers and continue with its parliamentary processing.

However, the Medical Strike Committee stated your rejection of this agreementwhich includes a specific chapter dedicated to the group, and confirmed that it would continue with its calendar of mobilizations, which begins this Saturday with a demonstration in Madrid. At 12:00 p.m., doctors from all the autonomous communities are summoned in the Congress of Deputies to march to the Ministry of Health and make their protests visible.

As detailed by the Strike Committee, the Negotiation Area has not allowed a “true negotiation” of the union demands of the medical profession, since “it has been moved forward despite the opposition of the only professional union of physicians that sat at the table (CESM), with a practically anecdotal capacity for action.”

Regarding the chapter for doctors, contemplated in the Statute agreement, the Committee pointed out that It only specifically regulated the guards and not the working conditions of the professionals. Likewise, they indicated that the guards had been addressed in a “very insufficient and discriminatory” manner for medical and faculty claims.

In this way, with the strike, which is added to those that already took place last year, the medical unions will demand your own text for the medical and faculty group that recognizes “the special conditions of training, performance and responsibility” of these professionals.

Refusal from the Ministry of Health

The Minister of Health, Mónica García, has rejected on several occasions the development of an exclusive standard for doctors, considering that “it would break cohesion and generate inequalities” in the National Health System.

Given the call for a strike, García sent a letter to the Strike Committee in which he called on the unions to resort to the parliamentary initiatives available to obtain their own Statute or to negotiate directly. with the autonomous communities their working conditions.

In the letter, the head of Health indicated her respect for the right to strike, but specified that using this resource means an impact on citizenswith harm to patients and the functioning of the system.

In response, medical unions They defended the national strike as a “last option” to achieve their demands, after having attended dozens of meetings with the Ministry, held meetings with leaders of the parliamentary groups of Congress, appeared in the Senate, called strikes within the autonomous powers and negotiated with their health systems.

“Professionals have spent years seeing your day to day worsen with endless lists of patients due to lack of well-sized resources, with a work overload due to 24-hour days that prevent conciliation and that far exceed the total count of the rest of the health categories, with remuneration losses and obstacles to free exercise, which is causing many to decide to abandon the National Health System, and the actors involved are not attending to the demands of the group to tackle the problem,” they denounced.

This week’s medical strike will be the first of five that the Committee has planned until June. The following are scheduled for the weeks from April 27 to 30, of the May 18 to 22 and of June 15 to 19.

From the Spanish Confederation of Medical Unions, they have detailed that there are confirmed concentrations throughout the week in Aragon, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Valencian Community, Murcia, Extremadura, Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, Madrid, Basque Country, Catalonia, Andalusia and Galicia.