The Minister of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands, Esther Monzón, defended this Tuesday the delay data of the Canary Islands Health Service against the waiting list data presented by the opposition, which she considered incorrect or incomplete, while PSOE and Nueva Canarias have accused Monzón of making up the data and "hiding patients".
During the plenary session of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, the PSOE deputy who requested the appearance, Miguel Ángel Pérez del Pino, asked the Minister to "operate more", because she does not do it "more than before" and said that Monzón likes to use the waiting list that "is not structural".
He also accused the Government of "sending more packages of patients to the private sector, especially in the case of traumatology and ophthalmology in the Negrín, which is the most obvious", added del Pino.
According to his figures, del Pino asserted that outpatient consultations have increased by 7%, something that, he said, the current Government attributes to greater chronicity while, in times of pandemic, "it was the fault of the Pacto de las Flores".
"Your waiting list makeup is mediocre. A patient's process begins with a request for an interconsultation; until you assign the appointment, that appointment does not count. They keep them in a mailbox," said Pérez del Pino, who asked why the delay from when a specialist is requested until the patient is attended to is not published.
In his opinion, if that data were published, the Minister "would not have that lightness" when addressing the Parliament, while pointing out that "a ball of patients is being created that at some point will burst from the pressure, because everything that enters the waiting list for consultations will end up in an outpatient or surgical process sooner or later".
"There are less than 40 patients in the Negrín waiting for an appointment in dermatology, compared to 10,000 in the HUC. They have a manager who is excellent at hiding patients," del Pino ironized.
In her turn, Monzón defended that the waiting list data "is very positive", such as the decrease in delay, and that the waiting time to undergo an intervention is at the national average.
"It was about time that the Canary Islands left the tail end," celebrated Monzón, who pointed out that as of June 30, 2023, there were more than 36,000 people on the waiting list and today that figure has been reduced by 9.5%, while the waiting list of more than 6 months was 9,500, which they have managed to reduce by 23%, according to her figures.
She also defended that there has been an increase of 2.6% in surgical activity, with 145,000 interventions.
"We have to continue improving because we cannot be satisfied with the data," said Monzón, who also defended the referrals to private healthcare, because patients, she said, do not care who operates on them, but when.
