Intersindical Canaria and Canarias con Palestina have defended the "accurate analysis" offered by the Federation of Associations for the Defense of Public Healthcare. Said federation has warned of a "globally privatizing trend" in public healthcare in Spain.
These groups have indicated that the privatization of public healthcare has "its peculiarities" in the Canary Islands and have denounced that the archipelago has a "public healthcare system endemicly weakened in resources, which is also used as an excuse by the current right-wing government presided over by Clavijo, to finance and strengthen private healthcare through agreements".
Thus, they have highlighted that "professionals, trained and skilled in public healthcare, desert to the private sector because they are offered better salary and working conditions there, while public healthcare centers remain obsolete in equipping private healthcare facilities with comfort and modernization".
These associations have pointed out "the transfer of public funding" to private centers. Thus, they have added that "to make matters worse, public healthcare, without increasing its resources, suffers the onslaught in the seven islands of an excessive and growing healthcare pressure from users and patients coming from the tourist-migratory avalanche." Thus, in 2024 alone, an additional 27,000 people were incorporated with the right to healthcare in the Canary Islands Health Service.
Both groups have highlighted that "these alleged healthcare deficits in the Canary Islands as a whole, we reiterate, are accompanied by governmental management that shows marked professional contempt for all healthcare workers, who are also punished with a limitation of their labor rights and whose staff numbers are reduced in inverse proportion to the increase in healthcare tasks".
Faced with the current demand for a new Framework Labor Statute, the drag of the retrograde and corporatist trade union movement, developed by the so-called medical unions, does not help. They selfishly demand their own Statute, which weakens the position of all healthcare workers, including doctors, in relation to the Ministry of Health and the autonomous government.
In the global analysis, Intersindical Canaria has agreed with the Federation of Associations for the Defense of Public Health, stating that there is a continuous strategy of "harassment" against the National Health System, the most evident manifestations of which are:1.- The privatization of hospital care and the dismantling of Primary Care have accelerated in the Autonomous Communities governed by conservative parties.
2.- Major scandals have been uncovered in Andalusian or Madrid healthcare, and also in the Canary Islands with illegal agreements, which show the disasters of privatization.
3.- The situation of waiting lists has substantially worsened, becoming increasingly falsified, while poor governance persists due to a lack of planning and politicized management in the hands of administrators appointed based on political affinity.Finally, they have pointed out the importance of joining forces, from unions, political and citizen associations to "stop the current right-wing surge and its effects on healthcare and public services".
