The negotiation of the new draft statute for legal health workers is “already at the last point” of active negotiations between the Ministry of Health and the main unions in the sector, said the Minister of Health, Monica García, who closed the door on the possibility of preparing her own regulatory text for the medical profession.
In response to a question about where the negotiations on the statute stand today, he said: “We have already reached the final point in which the majority of the demands of the health community and medical groups have been integrated into a text that wants to bury the fragility, timeliness and instability that health workers have been suffering for many years, as a result of the statute 22 years ago that no one has taken out of the drawer.”
“Once you take it out of the drawer, it does not become a bit complicated, but it is true that the new text combines the reduction of on-call hours, the hours of call-up, the reduction of working hours, the reduction of weekly and annual working limits, the reduction of the time period to a minimum, to two years, as defined, by the way, by a European ruling. It puts at the center the rights of conciliation, the rights to the ability to investigate and train during the working day. In short, it puts forward all those demands that have Compiled by Europe Press: “We professionals have been demanding for many decades.”
García defended a special chapter for doctors, closing the door on the possibility of preparing a specific regulatory text for them, as “unsustainable” and “a very serious mistake”, which would mean giving “priority in some way” within the national health system to a group already included in the framework statute.
“They know this (…), and I insist, there is not a single society that supports it, and there is not a single political party that supports this demand, and that is why I think it is unsustainable,” he added, expressing his hope that this text will be approved in 2026, because “it will solve the vast majority of the problems of instability and instability that health professionals have suffered in the past twenty years.”
However, he pointed out that we must be aware of what are the powers of the framework statute and what are the powers of the autonomous regions, because “many of the demands of professionals collide, in some way, with the demands of the autonomous regions themselves.”
Regarding the improvements that health workers will achieve, the Minister used a football analogy: “The statute, if we put ourselves in football terms, is what sets the rules, which sets the area, what is the goal, what is the penalty kick, but then how the players are arranged, how the players or the referees are paid, is determined by the autonomous communities.”
In this sense, he pointed out that “there are societies that pay their professionals well and there are societies that pay their professionals poorly,” whether the hour of demand or the rest of the supplements that depend on the societies. In such cases, the Statute establishes a common minimum to which all Territories must adhere such that there is a minimum level of rest for all professionals, minimum working hours, maximum working hours and on-call working hours, with it being the autonomous communities that must guarantee these working conditions.
Criticism of privatization of supply
In response to a question about the specific data on cancer screenings that autonomous communities should send to them, the Minister indicated that it is the data that will allow citizens to “restore confidence in their communities, especially in communities governed by the Popular Party.” In this sense, he pointed out that these programs are the “cornerstone” of the health system, because they help prevent three types of cancer (breast, cervical and colon) “and are necessary for their timely detection and for treatments to be less severe.”
In his opinion, the initial refusal to provide screening data by some autonomous communities is “another attack on public health by the Popular Party government (…) which clearly has no one at the wheel.”
Likewise, he blamed privatization and outsourcing of services for errors in notification of proposals: “This kind of error is about dismantling a procedure, a procedure that has to move like clockwork and when you dismantle it and outsource some parts, privatize other parts, other parts are done by primary care and other parts are done by a company, in the end you lose control.”
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