“The medical profession has finally woken up and we are not going to go back to sleep. We are not only doing this for ourselves, but also for the patients. We are not a military force and they treat us as if we were.” With these words, the general secretary of the AMYTS, Ángela Hernández, addressed the thousands – according to the Madrid union, although the national police present estimates them at around 600 – of doctors who demonstrated this Tuesday from the Congress of Deputies and in front of the AMYTS headquarters. Ministry of Healthin the center of Madrid, to protest against the bill Framework status what the department led by the minister is proposing Monique Garcia. This demonstration marked the start of a strike which began this Tuesday, in the middle of the flu wave, and which is convened by the Spanish Confederation of Medical Unions (CESM) and the Andalusian Medical Union (SMA) for the next three days, until December 12 throughout Spain.
Shouting “Monica, traitor, where are you now?” “Monica, listen, it was your fight too” or “We call it a vocation and it is not; exploitation is what it is”, around a thousand doctors of all ages gathered at 10:00 a.m. in front of the Congress, from where they left around 10:30 a.m. towards the headquarters of the Ministry of Health. Isabel Vázquez, family doctor with 34 years of experience, explains to 20 minutes who has two reasons to support the strike: “Demand respect for health professionals and respect for patients. Because if doctors do not have the working conditions in which we can be, the one who loses is the patient and we too go home badly. We are very struck by the narrow-mindedness of a minister who once stood guardshe worked like us, and now she doesn’t seem to remember what she asked for back then, which is the same thing we asked for.
Not far away is Elisa Fernández, a young doctor in the emergency department of the Guadalajara Hospital who, after almost five years of experience and having been a mother, decided to resign from her job to be able to reconcile and not work out of obligation. “I stopped working because of the conditions. I have a little girl and she had a discount.but they do 100% custody, but as they pay nothing, I have been under contract for a year, which counts as six months of 100% on-call.. “That’s why I left work,” he says. Now his goal is to get a job in primary care in Madrid “because there are no mandatory on-calls.”
Among the banners were slogans such as “Guards, slave labor, they pay taxes but don’t contribute”, “For 35 hours a week”, “Without sleeping and without stopping, one mistake can kill. Arrest guards 24 hours a day” or “Monica, wake up, health care finds itself without staff”, also includes Javier Ortega López, general surgeon at the Hospital del Tajo (Madrid) and with 35 years of experience behind him. “Before we had a medical status and it was removed by the current Framework Statute. We want to go back to the past. We want to have our own status because we, doctors, form a staff with skills and responsibilities different from those of other professionals, and we want our own negotiating table like the one we had before 2003“, he told this newspaper.
On another banner, a Mafalda doll reflects that “when I grow up, I no longer want to be a doctor” because, among other reasons given, she cannot sleep, she does not sleep, she takes medication and it is precarious work. Its carrier is Blanca Lucio, who is completing her fourth year of residency in neurology at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid. His brief career “was enough to show that many changes are necessary.” After a two-month stay in France, he admits that what worries him most are the 24-hour guards, which “tired him a lot.” As a neurologist, she explains that “a stroke can occur at six in the morning without having slept at all since seven in the morning the day before, when it is a vital emergency that must be responded to with all your senses“. To cope with this “stress” of work, with “four, five or six” shifts per month, he assures, many doctors have to take medication before and after their shift.
Developing news. More information soon.
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