When they ask me what I think Aragón-Teruel Exist can contribute to the Health debate, I always answer the same thing: a vision attached to the territory, which does not forget anyone because they are small. A less urban, less centralist and more rural vision. I think that political plans, on many occasions, are prepared with good will but with little street-level knowledge.
And in the case of the recent debate on Primary Care, I am concerned about some conclusions from the last Primary Care Congress in which the College of Physicians ruled on an optimization of the Health Map of Aragon with criteria that, let’s be frank, to us, the Since we live in areas with very low population density, it penalizes us without justification.
I am a mayor before I am a politician, I know how my neighbors in Utrillas think and I agree with the position of the entire Cuenca Minera region, because we have been suffering for many years from a shortage of health resources and personnel. I know firsthand the difficulties in attracting doctors to our Health Center, and I do everything in my power to facilitate that coming. Mayors, regardless of their political affiliation, work for all residents, no matter who they vote for. Or so I want to believe. When I hear the government’s plans I don’t see figures, I see my neighbors. That is why I return to the College of Physicians and I do not understand that they talk about optimizing small offices, that they are committed to distributing the current precariousness. They want to eliminate local clinics on which fewer than 300 health cards depend, to centralize the service in larger populations. In politics, optimizing always means that someone is going to suffer. And that has nothing to do with redistributing, nothing can be redistributed if the result is that the rights of a part of the population will be diminished. In this case, those neighbors who live and resist attached to the territory and who will see the quality of their health care diminished.
Cutting is not the solution. More funding for healthcare is also not enough on its own. It must be combined with other measures. The other day, the Primary Care manager advanced some measures, such as trying to fill positions that are difficult to fill through a merit-based competition. The College of Physicians doesn’t think it’s good either. With the enormous respect that I have for these professionals and as a defender of their essential task to establish population, I tell them: work with the territory to provide reasonable solutions. Don’t talk to us about optimization from Zaragoza. We are your patients, and you are essential to us. That medical professionals prefer large hospitals and large populations seems a proven fact. That on the current path, that trend is not reversed, too. So what do we do? From Aragón – Teruel We ask for more resources for Primary Care, because that is what determines the population. They ask us where that money is going to come from. Don’t they realize that working at the first level of healthcare saves a lot of money because it minimizes hospital care, which is much more expensive? That is direct savings. But on the other hand, there is still an incentive problem. We will also have to work on that. The validation of titles of people from other countries can be accelerated. You can work with perfectly trained young people who have not entered the MIR. It is a problem that will have to be approached from many perspectives. How to facilitate the rental of a home, for example. Of those solutions attached to the territory, we mayors have a master’s degree.
The only thing I ask, that we ask, is that the solution is not to distribute misery. It seems that we are being forced to choose between the model of Dr. House or that of Doctor in Alaska, when the correct thing would be for both to coexist.
