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ACTS Post opinions with a wide range of perspectives to encourage constructive discussion.
The metropolis of Madrid, with its 6.6 million inhabitants, is once again the European epicenter of the pandemic. Dr. Angela Hernández says there is a serious shortage of medical staff and intensive care units are overcrowded in the meantime. On September 22 alone, almost 3,000 people were admitted to Madrid hospitals, 400 of them in intensive care units.
“We did not learn the lessons we needed.”
There are other reasons for the new outbreak. Initially, coronavirus tests were not carried out anywhere in Spanish airports and elsewhere, only in case of justified suspicion of infection. The reason – lack of laboratories to do research. Madrilenians are desperate for the new restrictions because they are quite disciplined in their protective measures, including wearing protective masks.
“The fact that no one was prepared for the March pandemic, although it was already in full swing, I can understand. But I do not understand why the politicians did not learn any lessons from it,” said the doctor and did not stop. complains about the low salaries of doctors in most of the 17 autonomous provinces of Spain.
Healthcare with many shortcomings
The low salaries in health are also due to the low contributions of the Spanish to health insurance. All citizens pay into public health insurance, but the amounts are relatively low compared to other Western countries. For example, the self-employed pay about 300 euros per month, but this contribution also includes contributions to pension insurance.
“Underfunded Spanish healthcare depends on rapid diagnosis and short hospital stays. But we don’t have resources for prevention or rehabilitation,” said health expert Alberto Jiménez, director of the Fundación Economía y Salud in Madrid.
There is another factor in the rapid increase in infections. In Spain, and especially in Madrid, the population lives densely. “Many people share small houses because the rents are expensive. However, they easily infect each other,” says Dr. Hernández, explaining the high number of new infections in working-class neighborhoods like Carabacel.
And not only that: the visit to a specialty doctor is carried out through the mandatory mediation of health centers, which act as a screening filter, to avoid excessive overload of hospitals. However, these health centers have become sources of contagion, so they no longer give visiting hours. This, in turn, leads to the fact that many patients remain undiagnosed.
In the pandemic, it turned out that German healthcare, while expensive and partly inefficient, still has at least one significant advantage. In Germany there are 34 intensive beds per 100,000 inhabitants, while in Spain there are only 10 per 100,000 inhabitants. Furthermore, hospitals in Spain are mainly concentrated in large cities, and access to healthcare is not so easy in the countryside.
Second in the world in life expectancy
Despite these shortcomings, Spanish healthcare also has strengths. In terms of life expectancy, Spain is second in the world after Japan. Madrid and Barcelona are also world-renowned groupings of numerous medical studies. The country as a whole has a large number of extremely good hospitals, and all this without high contributions to health insurance.
Given that a large part of the administrative services are digitized, and even in Madrid there are digital medical records of patients, it is not clear that the country cannot offer a system for monitoring and controlling the chains of contagion. To this end, the Madrid government wanted to involve people to carry out these functions on a voluntary basis.
Meanwhile, this task is performed even by soldiers. If it were cheap, ”a nurse complains. The overcrowded staff in Madrid hospitals are even preparing to go on strike. “We know the time may not be right, but it is our only means of lobbying after politicians refuse to learn from the spring crisis,” said Dr. Hernandez.
Author: Stephanie Claudia Mueller
Spain
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