Madrid’s health unions announced Thursday a collective action against the Ministry of Health of the Community of Madrid “for its very serious and repeated failures in the prevention of occupational risks in primary care.”
“The Community of Madrid does not comply with the Primary Care Law which, since 1995, requires the establishment of a risk map, preventive planning and an occupational risk prevention plan for its professionals,” affirm all the organizations that promote this conflict. The groups signing this lawsuit are Amyts, CCOO, SATSE, CSIT Unión Profesional, UGT, CSIF and APSeMueve.
These organizations estimate that they are defending more than 15,000 health center professionals, who feel “without protection” at the risk of “suffering from physical and mental health problems”. According to the spokesperson for the CSIF, Fernando Felipe, during the press conference held this Thursday, “if there was a prevention plan”, the administration would have tools to deal with “physical and verbal attacks” suffered by primary care workers, not just the health sector. workers, but also administrative staff and guards. “They are not quantified,” Felipe assured of these attacks.
For his part, Vicente Martín, spokesperson for ApSeMueve, reports that in recent years there have been approximately 90 individual decisions favorable to professionals that oblige the Community of Madrid to compensate, for this reason, up to 8,000 euros to each professional concerned.” This is one of the reasons that motivated this collective dispute in which they are demanding compensation of five million euros.
“We were forced to resort to the courts to achieve our main and only objective: to preserve the safety and health of all primary care workers,” declared all the complainant union organizations, which claim to have attempted to negotiate and dialogue with the ministry. , without success for the moment.
The Community of Madrid dissociates itself from the accusations of these unions. The Ministry of Health published a press release in which it ensures that this department “has had a preventive action strategy in the face of situations of psychosocial risk since 2019”. However, the Regional Executive noted that “preventive planning (the specific measures to be implemented) was slowed down by the pandemic in 2020”.
The plan’s measures cited by the ministry have made it possible to reduce “attacks against primary care professionals by 7% so far this year and compared to 2023”, indicates the regional health directorate. And he adds: “Another element of great impact is the reduction in workload and, consequently, a psychosocial improvement, thanks to the 40% reduction in vacancies in family medicine between January and September of this year. The promoters of the demand indicate that the strategy disseminated by Health was not developed with the consensus of trade union organizations.
