Good morning!
Today I’m going to tell you about Andalusia, because it can also be Spain within Spain. Like Madrid. The fact is that it has not been the best of weeks for the Andalusian government. To understand: those who control how public money is spent in the community (the Intervention, that’s what it’s called) told Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla’s team it’s not like thatwho cannot abuse as she does small chained contracts to buy medicine, carry out work in a hospital or order Christmas decorations.
In technical contract jargon, they are called minor contracts and are designed for small expenses. They cannot exceed 15,000 euros and, as their nature is to pay small expenses, they are subject to minimum controls. The problem, the Intervention told the Council in a report What my colleague Daniel Cela revealed is when you put together a lot of these mini-contracts to pay for something big whose volume would require a public tender or negotiation without advertising (another technical word), d other modalities envisaged by law.
Faced with this mess in Andalusia, we consulted a series of experts in health planning and management. we wondered if this could happen in more places. The answer every time we picked up the phone was the same: it’s a widespread practice, it happens more than it should, sometimes they are divided for the sake of agility. My favorite response was: “They are contract recruiting junkies. »
It can be explained more or less like this: “Contract law is too rigid and dysfunctional for health care, but when it is divided by necessity, many are putting salad between the cabbages.” The healthcare industry often requires quick responses, unexpected purchases and high expenses.
This is an authoritative argument to justify some reductions, experts agree. This is a “very politically sensitive” question because “no one would understand stopping the purchase of a medicine”. Another very different thing is that it is systematically used for everything. In Andalusia, all kinds of concepts have been unveiled (some you wouldn’t imagine) reaching 468 million euros in a single year. A bit strange.
Within the Andalusian Government itself, the Minister of Health He wanted to save his ship, but not the one with the Christmas lights. “It is completely false to say that there are contracts that violate the law. “I’m talking about health, I’m not talking about Christmas lighting, I’m not going to talk about those things.” Andalusia, I fear, is not the first community –We already told a similar case in Madrid in 2018– and it won’t be the last either. This does not mean, however frequent it may be, that it is done well.
While you were doing something else…
The good news of the week
A 25-year-old diabetic woman managed to produce his own insulin. It sounds like a miracle but it’s called science. A group of Chinese researchers have carried out a complex process of transplanting stem cells reprogrammed to function like a mini pancreas.
The problem with people with type 1 diabetes, like this patient, is that they are not able to produce such an important hormone as insulin which allows glucose to be distributed to all organs and not accumulate in the bloodstream.
We must be careful not to say that diabetes is curable, because the experiment was successful in only one patient, but this example opens the door to hope. Without a doubt, the best news of the week.
Have a good weekend. I’ll be waiting for you next Saturday with more things.
Sofia
