The Virgen del Rocío Hospital in Seville has admitted to having paid irregular salary supplements to dozens of nurse coordinators and auxiliary nurses for 21 years for nights, public holidays and shifts not worked, but it does not plan to claim the money unduly paid to these intermediate positions. Faced with an internal complaint which revealed that two coordinators of the Andalusian reference center would have earned 108,000 euros over the last five years without having worked there, Virgen del Rocío recognized the illicit expenditure on thousands of salaries and canceled dozens of similar accusations – estimated at around 80 by the unions – to put an end to this irregular practice which has lasted for more than two decades. The extent of the damage caused to the treasury is unknown since these bonuses were an open secret and are widespread in the 51 hospitals in the region, but the Andalusian Government (PP) refuses to calculate them and make reimbursements.
Although the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) has made a clean slate without looking back and does not plan to claim these payments, it remains to know the opinion of the Anti-Fraud Office, which has been investigating the case for a month and must decide whether it sees signs of misappropriation of public funds and refer it to the Prosecutor’s Office. The Seville hospital, epicenter of the breast cancer screening crisis, confirms that “the coordination figure will be definitively eliminated before the end of the current year”, according to a spokesperson, who refuses to specify the exact number of coordinators dismissed.
The Andalusian Minister of Health, Presidency and Emergencies, Antonio Sanz, admitted last Thursday in the Regional Parliament that the events reported date back to 2004: “They did not take money to do nothing in the coordination of nursing care in the surgical block of the hospital. They didn’t take money to do nothing, they fulfilled a function. supplement,” he told MPs.
The long-standing problem is that supervisors of many hospital departments in the nursing field need staff to coordinate teams of dozens of health professionals whose schedules and leave require a lot of management and bureaucracy. But the people chosen for these tasks stopped receiving salary supplements and their salaries were reduced, so paradoxically they would receive less money despite their new coordination work. The systematic and erroneous solution was to continue to pay them for night shifts, public holidays and rotating shifts as if they were still working, even though their work was from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the week.
The center’s director, Nieves Romero, gathered the dozens of coordinators at the end of November to inform them that their appointments were canceled and that they would carefully examine the needs of each department, to add more intermediary positions. Currently, the center has already published 16 new calls for applications for nursing supervisors and block leaders in the Council’s Official Gazette, and in January a further 13 will be published for new positions. These appointments are part of a plan to organize intermediate positions that the hospital is undertaking, according to a spokeswoman.
In his parliamentary intervention, Sanz warned the socialist deputy who asked him if he would claim these financial sums if it was proven that they had been imputed inappropriately: “These are facts that date from decades ago, I repeat, do not worry”, he declared in reference to the 36 years of PSOE governments, in power in Andalusia until 2019. Just before, he added: “The practice appeared during of his years of government and they come to give us “We have corrected and taken structural measures. There is now an internal information system that did not exist before, with guarantees, traceability and control. The complaint allows us to review something that was going wrong and a management reorganization plan (…) The complaint allows us to review something that, with your agreement, was working poorly.”
The complainants who addressed the SAS, the Andalusian Anti-Fraud Office and the Regional Ombudsman proposed that the organizations verify the work sheets of the supervisor of the Clinical Management Unit of Maternal and Fetal Medicine, Genetics and Reproduction of Virgen del Rocío, the work attendance signature sheets and the payroll paid. The Andalusian health system only considers the figure of the coordinator in health centers and in units such as mental health, but in hospitals it is not recognized, the scale of middle management begins rather with the supervisors, and above the block heads, deputy directors and directors.
Annex II of Decree 132 of 2021, which regulates management positions and intermediate positions of the SAS, includes very few hospital exceptions, such as coordinator of care technicians for auxiliary nurses and sectoral transplant coordinator, among others.
“It is historic, naming without naming. We consider it fatal that the payroll is falsified and it is fraud to put in nights without doing them because no public appointment has been made. This money collected must be returned. On the one hand, it hurts us that our colleagues have not been paid, we have mixed feelings”, says Nieves Conejo, CC OO delegate at the hospital.
La Virgen del Rocío has suffered a reduction in personnel costs this year of 7.15% compared to 2024, according to internal SAS data. This percentage represents a reduction of almost 25.3 million compared to the 353.7 million spent by the center last year. Regarding the latest controversy that occurred in the center, Reyes Zabala, from the Satse nurses union, specifies: “These coordinators were health care colleagues who were going to coordinate. Our salaries are low and we compensate for them with variable concepts like night shifts, holidays and shifts, in addition to the six special holidays of the year. overloading the usual patches or shortcuts is not worth it (…) It was a turning point,” he says about the controversy that arose, the final extent of which remains to be determined.
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