Primary care physicians, represented by the Association of Primary Care Physicians of the Canary Islands (AMAPCAN), have demanded a reduction in the administrative tasks they support daily in the office.
This has been announced by the College of Physicians of Las Palmas, which wants to "serve as a speaker and disseminate to the population the improvement proposals they consider necessary for the proper functioning of their profession".
According to reports, primary care professionals are immersed in a "huge" amount of these procedures. "They consume much of our time and energy, which we cannot use in the clinical care of patients," they say from the association that represents them.
Faced with this situation, and having "not received a response" from their "repeated requests for a meeting with the SCS management", primary care physicians have decided to stop processing two of these tasks.
One of them is to make a new interconsultation to a service outside primary care in which the patient is being followed up, because, for whatever reason, the last scheduled assistance in that service was not carried out. "As it is a recovery of appointment, not a new referral, it does not require the intervention of the primary care physician," they say.
The other is to make a new interconsultation to a service outside primary care, which, once the patient has been assessed, considers that it should review it again within a certain period. These follow-up appointments "do not require a new interconsultation by the primary care physician and patients can and should be directly appointed by the service that performs the follow-up," they say.
In this regard, they point out that these tasks are of a "purely administrative" nature and do not require any medical criteria, so, from AMAPCAN consider that they should be performed by the administrative staff of the SCS and not by doctors, "who should focus their time and effort on medical or scientific work.
In this sense, they argue that "a small change in the management of these points would mean a considerable increase in the speed of assistance and would allow us to have more effective time for medical care to patients, which would in turn result in a better service and greater agility for society in the processing of their appointments with hospital services, as they would not have to wait for an appointment with their primary care physician for these procedures".
