The Official Gazette of the Generalitat Valenciana, almost nine months after the reversal of the Torrevieja Hospital, has published the subrogation of all the workers of the Department of Health, for which they are now officially part of the hospital centre staff.
This is the subrogation of more than a thousand workers who came to depend directly on the Generalitat after the reversal, since they previously had a contract with Torrevieja Salud, the Ribera Salud subsidiary in charge of managing the local hospital. In this way, the Generalitat complies with the permitting legislative procedure, which gave it nine months for the publication in the DOGCV of the list of personnel.
The document includes both permanent workers and temporary staff. It also points out those who, despite the fact that they are no longer in the hospital for any reason, were at the time that the Department of Health assumed direct management, as of October 16, 2021. According to the Ministry of Health, at the time they took over the management, 1,043 workers had been hired. However, many of them, especially senior managers and department heads, have left the hospital in recent months, either to relocate to other Ribera Salud companies or by their own decision, which has caused complaints and continuous delays such as long waits in the Emergency Room and the lack of Radiologists.
According to the Department of Health, the current workforce is made up of almost 1,800 workers, which represents an increase of 58% of the workforce. However, the unions and the Company Committee, as this medium has been collecting in recent weeks, continue to ask for more means, especially in the Emergency area, to put an end to the collapses, which have registered up to 18 hours of waiting. A situation that, in addition, they expect to worsen this summer, since this shortage of personnel is aggravated by two very important circumstances. The first is the population increase in the department of Torrevieja, which has multiplied its population by three due to the strong tourist occupation and second homes on the coast of Torrevieja and Orihuela Costa; the second is that the vacations of medical personnel, for whom no substitutes are found.
Therefore, the unions demand more health and human resources to reduce this collapse. All this and despite the fact that the Ministry announced a few days ago, the shock plan that began at the beginning of June has already managed to reduce waiting times by 15%, a figure that the Committee considers insufficient.
