Orihuela Costa needs a much larger health centre to provide a suitable service for its coastal residents, especially in summer when the population triples in size. This issue has long been a cause of disagreement between the City Council and the Generalitat.
On the one hand, the Ministry of Health is willing to undertake an extension to the current centre, located in Aguamarina, as the previous Valencian Government stated at the time, while the Orihuela Council continues to insist that a second health centre needs to be built.
The Spanish press is now reporting that the government team has repeated its offer of a site, which is none other than the location already proposed by the former mayor Emilio Bascuñana in 2021 for the same purpose, which was understood, at the time, to be a strategy of pressure on the Botánico, absorbed in full reversion to the public management of the Torrevieja hospital.
Located in PAU-20 La Ciñuelica, the plot has 10,693 square metres of surface and is in an area of which the local executive states would help to make a geographically more equitable distribution of patients, since Aguamarina would pay attention to the southern half of Orihuela Costa and this new centre, to the northern half.
The current councillor of Health, Irene Celdrán, has stated that she did not favourably view the extension of Aguamarina, as proposed by the PSOE in the Consell, because, she said, it would generate a traffic problem in the area straddling Cabo Roig and Campoamor as the plot on which the extension is intended is used by residents for parking, markets and, occasionally, to set up small fairs in the summer.
The previous councillor for Health, Luis Quesada (PSOE), was especially critical of the position of the Popular Party motion stating that he left everything ready to carry out the extension of the plot in Aguamarina and that the investment was already available in the budget of the Torrevieja health authority, to which the health centre belongs.
To make matters worse, however, it is now the manager of the Torrevieja Health Authority himself, José Cano, who adds further uncertainty to the situation by telling the mayors of the municipalities he serves that he was contemplating a plan to expand the Aguamarina centre, stating that, according to data revealed by the Platform for 100×100 Public Health, he planned to spend 4.8 million euro to do so between from 2023 and 2025.
However, as legislators dither over making a final decision, it is the patients, from all sectors of society, that continue to suffer, and with such poor leadership coming at all levels of the governmental spectrum it is no wonder that the general public continue to have little faith or respect for our politicians.
