Despite the fanfare that the health service is fully prepared for summer, with comments like Torrevieja hospital will have 100% cover this year, and even the Mayor of Torrevieja, Eduardo Dolón, meeting to discuss the situation, accompanied by the councillor for cleaning, even though it falls outside the competencies of the town hall, and despite the protestations of the groups representing patients and medical staff who are airing their doubts, the SAMU paramedic ambulances will once again be left without doctors at crucial times.
The SAMU units have to be staffed by a doctor, a nurse, and a technician. The doctors receive a pay bonus for taking on the role, having seen an increase negotiated only recently, and yet, still, there will not be enough doctors to cover.
In the city of Alicante, for almost half of the month of July (14 days) two ambulances from the Emergency Medical Care Service will be without any doctor to attend to emergencies.
According to the Health planning table, both the alpha-143 and the alpha-141 units will have several days without a doctor since they have not found anyone to do those shifts: the first on days 2, 9, 14, 15, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 28 and 29; the second on 8, 22 and 29. This means that for the dates of 22nd and 29th of July, there will be no doctor in two SAMUs in Alicante.
In the rest of the province there are also absences, although on a smaller scale. Thus, in Torrevieja there will be a lack of a doctor on alpha-172 on the 20th, 22nd, 28th and 29th; in Dénia 9, 14, 20 and 25; in Orihuela costa 23 and 29; Benidorm on the 5th; Alcoy on the 16th, like Elda; San Vicente del Raspeig 19 and 31; San Juan on the 19th and Elche on the 8th; Finally, in Santa Pola there will be no doctor at SAMU on the 29th either.
The trend, as can be seen, is that as the end of the month approaches, the service worsens. Which is precisely when the pressure on the Valencian public health system is increasing because, with the arrival of summer, the population of tourist areas such as the province of Alicante multiplies. There are also more emergencies to attend to in tourist population centres such as l’Alacantí, Vega Baja and Las Marinas.
In this sense, entities such as the Medical Union have spent years criticizing the organisation of the service, as well as the lack of reinforcements to alleviate the deficit of professionals at particularly difficult times.
The absence of medical professionals in the SAMU ambulances, something that has caused crises like the one in July last year, in which a man died of a heart attack after being treated by an ambulance without a doctor and had to be transferred to the hospital.
But not only that, there is a “significant lack of coordination”, according to sources from the Medical Union, when organising the service, made worse, they say, by the transfer of the coordination service to Valencia, a situation which is claimed to have contributed to the death of a man in La Marina when a distant ambulance was sent when one stood idle closer.
In the festivities of Hogueras, there was no driver in the main ambulance for a couple of hours because the designated personnel “did not know how to operate an automatic gearbox”; On another day, an employee was referred from Valencia who was “completely” unaware of the Alicante street map, which had also been substantially modified by the festivities.
