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CostaBlancaPeople 7th - 13th June 2022
7th - 13th June - edition 944
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Your Essential Weekly Read
Patients being sent to private clinics in bid to curb waiting lists See page 12
the pandemic brought with it a dramatic increase in waiting lists of patients awaiting an operation in the province of Alicante. the problem is being made even worse by the lack of specialists in several areas, and an apparent lack of beds, which prevents hospitals from operating at a higher rate in order to reduce waiting lists. For this reason, the Ministry of health is resorting to a so called ‘Shock Plan’, in an attempt to reduce the number of people waiting for surgical intervention. in the first three months of the year, 3,905 people were referred to private clinics in the province of Alicante to be operated on and the bill footed by the health Ministry. this is more than double the amount sent private in the first quarter of 2020, when the pandemic had only just broken out. if last year is taken as a reference, in the middle of the third wave of covid with hospitals and clinics practically taken over by the virus, referrals have increased by 43%, according to data provided by the ministry. Generally, it is the most ordinary procedures that are sent to private clinics for surgery and the rest remain in the public system. therefore the bulk of patients who are currently on the surgical waiting list are due to have minor procedures. Specifically, more than 50% of the patients waiting to be operated on in the Valencian Community are from ophthalmology, orthopedic Surgery or traumatology. if a patient refuses to undergo surgery
through a private clinic, he or she is placed at the bottom of the waiting list for public health. in addition to the Shock Plan, the Ministry of health can try to reduce waiting lists by ‘autoconcierto’. that is, paying overtime to surgical teams to operate in the afternoons outside of their working hours. due to the personnel needs of hospitals, this program has hardly changed compared to before the pandemic and in the
Alicante province barely a hundred more operations have been carried out compared to the first quarter of 2020, up to a total of 3,590 operations. Critics do concede that there has been a spectacular rebound compared to 2021, when in the first quarter only 776 people were operated on, but in those very months the hospitals in Continued on page 10