Juan Soler is a Popular Party deputy in the Madrid Assembly. He has also been a senator of the same party for several years. This Tuesday, Soler denounced the collapse of Madrid’s public health system. “In Ramón y Cajal, they don’t answer the phone,” he criticizes the public hospital in the Fuencarral-El Pardo district of the capital. “For days I have been trying to contact them to change a date and they have not answered any of my calls over 40, I repeat, 40,” he insists.
Indeed, the Madrid public health system is not experiencing its best moment. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets more than a year ago to defend the Community’s public health system and condemn the management of it by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the PP of the Community of Madrid . More than 250,000 people demonstrated to demand “public health and solutions to the primary care plan.” President Díaz Ayuso, meanwhile, insists that Madrid’s health care is “the best in Europe.”
This same month, exactly last Thursday, the Madrid health unions filed a complaint against the Ministry of Health of the Community of Madrid “for its very serious and repeated non-compliance with the prevention of occupational risks in primary care”. These organizations – Amyts, CCOO, SATSE, CSIT Unión Profesional, UGT, CSIF and APSeMueve – assure that the Government of the Community of Madrid chaired by Díaz Ayuso “has not complied with the 1995 law” on risk prevention for years.
Health center professionals have been denouncing a lack of staff for months. Groups of city residents denounced this year the “dismantling” of public health taking place in the region. The Ministry of Health, however, dissociates itself from the demands of the unions and assures that such a dismantling will not take place. Meanwhile, Madrilenians have lost hundreds of beds for care in public hospitals every year since 2019, 1,500 since that year and almost 300 since 2022. In 2023, 13,843 beds have been installed for care in public hospitals. admission, less than the 14,817 in 2022.
The Popular Party of Madrid, of which MP Soler is a member, in turn accuses the Ministry of Health led by the leader of Más Madrid, Mónica García, of having “broken everything”. “Everything has gotten worse, the waiting lists, the diagnoses, the surgeries, the outpatient consultations…,” Ayuso said during a session of the Madrid Assembly a few weeks ago.
