Santiago de Compostela, March 15, 2023
The Minister of Health, Julio García Comesaña, highlighted today, at the inauguration of the Conference: Health with an On-LIVE perspective, your department has just started the participatory process of the new Galician health strategy 2023-2030, “With which we will put women’s health at the center of all health policies.” According to the head of the health portfolio of the Galician Executive, “this strategy will incorporate the gender approach in its planning and care programs, as well as in the fields of research.”
During the event, led by Health, and with the support of Organon and the Galician Agency for Coñecemento en Saúde (ACIS), the minister said that, in preparing the Health Strategy, His department will have “the multidisciplinary participation of professionals from the Galician health system and those organizations and institutions that play an essential role in the development of the Galician health ecosystem.”
Our objective, -incided the head of Sergas-, “is not to have a specific document on women’s health, but to have the most comprehensive and participatory document possible and that in it women’s health permeates all health policies” .
Comesaña remarked that the Xunta already has a track record implementing activities designed to reinforce and improve women’s health care. Specifically, in the field of prevention, Health is placing a lot of emphasis on population screenings, “a line in which the Galician Government has a clear commitment with the increase of more than 70% of the item for screenings in the Budgets for 2023, until reaching 2.6 million”.
Galicia also has a breast cancer program with more than 30 years of history, and with which more than three million examinations were carried out. Thanks to this screening, nearly 11,000 cancers were discovered in these years, “of which almost 70% were in early stages”, having a much more favorable prognosis. In order to continue improving this program, the minister pointed out that the Xunta will expand the current range of 50 to 69 years in this legislature, to also extend it to Galician women from 45 to 74 years.
As detailed by Comesaña, Galicia also stands out in the field of cervical cancer screening. Its implementation began in the Lugo area in 2021, extending to the Pontevedra and Ferrol areas last year, and in the current year it will reach the remaining areas. In this way, “our community is six years ahead of the target set by the Ministry of Health, which indicates 2029 as the deadline to complete implementation.” Comesaña said that, at the beginning of this month, “we already had more than 17,000 results from participating women, of which more than 6% were positive for the virus high-risk human papilloma. In this way, the program is helping to prevent the progression of this cancer in many Galician women, getting more than 50% of the women of the target population to participate in the program.
Pelvic floor units
In the field of care, the Minister remarked that a great strength of the Galician Executive’s women’s health programs is attention to the pelvic floor. Thus, since 2017, Sergas has had a structured care program for pelvic floor dysfunctions in primary care in which, according to the latest available data, from 2017 to 2021 midwives cared for more than 4,500 women at this care level. with pelvic floor dysfunction.
In this section, Comesaña remarked that Galicia established, in the last year, multidisciplinary pelvic floor units in each health area, and completed the creation of specific consultations for endometriosis, also in all areas.
Along with the above, the incorporation of Da Vinci robots in the seven Galician areas made it possible for gynecology services to have already carried out 300 interventions with this new technology, and they are currently being used to operate on endometriosis or cervical or ovarian cancer. .
To end his speech at the conference, Comesaña was very satisfied with the development of the first equality plan of the Sergas, approved with the consensus of all the union organizations of the Sector Committee, and which has such important measures as awareness and training in equality for the professionals of the Sergas.
