As of April 1, the Community of Madrid will dispense with 60% of the 11,200 health workers who signed a Covid contract in March 2020. Most of them are doctors, nurses, assistants and laboratory technicians who were already part of the Service staff of Health of the Community of Madrid (SERMAS), but who did not count as structural personnel because they chained temporary contracts for years -and precarious- that left them out of the official statistics. These layoffs were scheduled for the end of December but the contracts were finally renewed for the sixth wave. Now, the layoffs are imminent despite the fact that the waiting lists have not stopped increasing in recent months and the demands of the professionals for the templates to be expanded.
Of those nearly 6,000 planned layoffs, more than 400 are doctors. The Ministry of Health has already informed the sector table that as of April 1, 2022, 60% of the workforce will go to the street.
The Community of Madrid will maintain 5,000 health professionals who signed Covid contracts, although many of them were already on the staff, albeit informally. Of these, 170 will be integrated into the new Functional Rehabilitation Unit that will be installed in the Enfermera Isabel Zendal Public Hospital for the treatment of patients with long-term care needs, not only from COVID, but also from other pathologies, reports the Ministry of Health it’s a statement.
This resource will also be aimed at patients previously treated at other hospitals in the Madrid public network for rehabilitation after orthopedic surgery, trauma and/or osteoarticular pathology; after a stroke; or patients with immobility secondary to recent hospitalization for other pathologies.
The Executive chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso approved its 2022 budget in December, which includes a decrease of 178 million euros less for Health compared to what was executed in 2019, the year before the pandemic. All this, while a tax reduction was approved that mainly benefits the highest incomes and with which Madrid stops collecting 334 million euros a year.
The cuts in social spending in recent decades in Madrid leave the Community as the one with the lowest percentage of its GDP allocated to health spending. In 2019, latest data collected by the Ministry of Health and pre-covid year, the Madrid government allocated only 3.7% to health. Only Catalonia was relatively close to Madrid, allocating 4.9%. These data contrast with those of other communities such as Extremadura (8.6%) or Asturias and Castilla-La Mancha (7.6%). The Spanish average is 5.6%, two points above Madrid.
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