The Xunta has shrouded in opacity the appointment of Eloína Núñez Masid, cousin of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to the position of deputy general director of Envellecemento Activo. It has chosen to fill the position through the least transparent procedure available to civil servants and has refused, in response to questions from this editorial office, to provide what her salary is, what resources she will work with and how many workers she will be responsible for.
When it was learned that she had been relieved of the management of the Santiago and O Barbanza health area, the Galician president, Alfonso Rueda, limited himself to saying that her future would depend on the Ministry of Health and the personnel preferences that she herself had. Now that the new job destination has been revealed, the Galician government confirms it, but avoids giving more information about it. The decision that the position would return to her was made on August 14, but it was not known until almost a month later. This is thanks to the information provided by Xunta workers, as published GaliciaPress. On September 9, Rueda confirmed this when asked about it. He maintained that Núñez Masid had sufficient merit for the position, within the organizational chart of the Department of Social Policy.
The CIG, the majority union of civil servants in the Xunta, criticises the method chosen for the appointment and the lack of transparency that it implies, according to them. When they learned that she would be deputy general director, explains the unionist Fernando García, they expected it to be published in the Official Gazette of Galicia (DOG). Until they realised that the coverage of the position had been carried out through a service commission, a legal instrument, but intended to be used “on an exceptional basis”, which, according to them, does not happen in this case. This is why they consider that there is a fraud of the law in the process.
García explains that the usual way to apply for a position in a subdirectorate is to open a free appointment process. This formula, he adds, implies greater publicity and that the resolution is published in the DOG, which does not happen with service commissions. The will of the Xunta is, according to him, to avoid being transparent. With this path, he adds that it is not known if there were other candidates or what merits were valued. The Galician government does not provide information on Eloína Núñez’s salary and limits itself to emphasizing that the position is reserved for civil servants and that its conditions are “exactly the same as those of the rest of the deputy directors.” On this basis and taking into account the age – her year of birth is 1962 – and the career of the former head of the Santiago health area, the CIG estimates that her salary is around 70,000 euros gross per year. The position, the union indicates, is the highest that a civil servant can access as such, a level 30.
The rules for establishing the payroll of civil servants are public, so the union calculates that it receives, in addition to the basic salary, a destination supplement and a specific supplement, to which are added the amounts of the three years completed and the career level. The total, with these assumptions, exceeds 70,000 euros, a salary equivalent to that of ministers such as the Minister of the Environment, Ángeles Vázquez, or Fabiola García, responsible for social policy and on which the subdirectorate general held by Eloína Núñez depends. In the Department of Active Envellecemento and Prevention of Dependency and Socio-health Innovation, he has his own office and will have to work with five other civil servants, notes the CIG.
The union also criticized the election of a person with Eloíña Núñez’s profile to a position related to the elderly. It is demanding her dismissal because it assures that the protocol it designed during the pandemic prevented elderly people in residences from being able to go to the hospital. “This cannot protect the elderly,” it concludes.
Controversial management
Núñez Masid graduated in medicine from the University of Santiago de Compostela. In 2009, a few weeks after her cousin took office for the first time as president of the Xunta, she became head of the health area of Orense, where she faced several conflicts. In 2017, she was appointed head of the Santiago – O Barbanza health area. And in her management, during all these years, there have been criticisms, complaints from patients and professionals and several resignations of heads of departments in protest against the conditions and situation of the hospitals under her responsibility.
None of these controversies cost him his job. Amid criticism that his style of work was authoritarian and disorganized and despite the fact that he even had to face strikes in some services, the president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, defended at the end of 2022 that the problems were “specific” and that the management was “adequate”. This year, after obtaining his first absolute majority at the polls, Rueda changed Minister of Health. The new head, Antonio Gómez Caamaño, had coincided, as head of the radiation oncology department of the Compostela complex, with Eloína Núñez. And among his first decisions at the head of Galician public health, there were several substitutions in the management of health areas, including that of Santiago.
