This week the Minister of Health convened an urgent meeting to address the problem of Spanish Primary Care which, like every winter, does not cease to accumulate headlines. Surely she had to listen to objective data that speak of the structural deterioration of the same, the progressive overload of care, the lack of resources and the delicate situation of professionals. Surely they taught her the numbers that indicate how it is increasingly difficult to find family doctors, fleeing abroad from the garbage contracts offered. The graphs indicate that in a few years a high percentage of the most veteran doctors will retire. In addition the population pyramids indicate that there will be more and more complex chronic patients...
It should not be easy to be responsible for a constitutional right such as health care when the structure of transfers of health services to the Autonomous Communities has been from the beginning an epitome of lack of coordination, political commodification and duplication of expenditure (multiplied information systems, non-centralized purchases of medicines, technology and external services among other things). And of course, what others have not fixed, I am not going to fix...
At the moment the chess movement of the lady minister is to propitiate a new working group to establish a guidebook that is almost the same as they have done dozens of times before her. We repeat the day of the marmot in an example of loss of opportunity to which we are sadly accustomed; this way the game will never be won. What health professional has not read a white paper of his specialty or professional role, of his service structure whether it be hospital or ambulatory, of the corresponding Community or of the scientific society or the Professional College on duty?
When we continue to see how the institutions fail when it comes to managing a public service, we cannot help but think about what drifts we are taking within zombie organizations that are more and more dead than alive, sustained by hordes of workers who are more and more exhausted and unmotivated. The fact is that when a family doctor finishes his shift after having attended to sixty people or the nursing staff of an emergency service burst day after day in what seems like a perpetual battle, they secretly desire to hang up the robe and get involved in politics, or in any activity far from assistance.
Solutions have been on the table for some time. For years we have known that the path must go towards management autonomy, staff motivation, flexibility in the provision of services and education in self-care and in a better use of the health system by the citizenship, among other things. The problem continues to be who puts the rattle on the cat, given that a profound reform of the public health system requires "blood, sweat and tears" from taxpayers and that has a political cost that requires a level of guts, ethics and the search for the common good that no one has so far given.
This situation makes you want to call for the resignations of those with responsibilities in the matter. But we would get an unassumable list because it is terribly long. Ministers, Health Counsellors, advisors, management technicians, directors, deputy directors and other management personnel make up a real army within each of the 17 autonomous health systems. What is certain is that in spite of the fact that political alternation changes them from time to time at the most, small cosmetic arrangements of sheet metal and paint are dealt with without anyone daring to promote the profound reform that the system has been crying out for decades.
The scenario is very difficult, given that the health care organization itself is a complex mathematical system that was created for a particular political and social situation that has changed quite a bit and is evolving at a devilishly fast pace for the rigidity and inertia of solid pyramidal organizations with a minimum margin for innovation and change. Who will undertake the task of rethinking the system and implementing the changes necessary to achieve the transition? Probably nobody from within the same system, will have to go out with nets to fish in the oceanic social waters and raise the fish both to the citizens and to a consensus table in which political representatives of all colors participate. Much will have to change to stop politicizing something as greedy as health that moves a large percentage of the pie of public money and learn to look beyond the benefit itself to seek the social good. If we don't succed the market will be the one who wins the game and ends up making the decisions. If this happens, society will have lost a treasure that it never fully understood or valued.
Meanwhile the orchestra to which I belong continues to attack light scores while the great ship sinks, slowly but steadily, into the cold waters of an adverse economic situation. If we look closely, there are tears in many of the musicians, just as salty as the conjunctural sea that will soon receive them with open arms.
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