October 14, 2020
The spokesperson and deputy of VOX in the General Meeting, Ignacio Blanco, in the ‘Questions to the President’ turn that took place today in the Plenary of the General Meeting of the Principality formulated the following question:
When did you stop applauding the health personnel?
And then he made the following intervention:
Mr President, you may not like what I am telling you, but you are using the toilets as a clinic, you take advantage of them for your marketing campaign, but when your own management decisions generate problems in the primary care services , discards them and asks to be reported.
When did you stop applauding them? I remember the video in which you came out to applaud the health personnel from the window of your office in the Presidency at eight in the afternoon, I don't know if that's the only time you applauded them. Today I think that those applause were just another frame from his marketing campaign. Because now he asks citizens to report irregularities in health centers.
This Friday, the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord will be awarded to Spanish Sanitarians, a decision that you endorsed and for which we all congratulate ourselves. What has happened so that the applause and awards go to request that management problems be reported in health centers, as it has done recently, placing our health workers in an unsustainable situation?
A perverse situation to which the health workers who have not decided on the management are subjected and you are now asking that the problems that their decisions have generated and not the work of the health workers be reported. Management problems generated by you, when you limit the resources to serve citizens, do not facilitate the proper organization, or suspend follow-ups not related to COVID-19.
If we ask all of them today, I am convinced that they would tell you that you can save your applause, and your awards of harmony because they are nothing more than a political attempt to take advantage of the effort and sacrifice of health personnel, without real recognition. In his famous COVID-19 marketing campaign, he dispatched medical staff with applause and diplomas.
You said that the Princess of Concord award to the Spanish Health Personnel was of justice, but I tell you that justice is to protect them, pay them properly, protect the doctors who give birth and lose up to almost 30% of their pay on their maternity leave, that they have decent contracts, and not interim contracts chained for years. Protecting them is providing them with means. Protecting them is not asking to be reported.
President, at VOX we want quality health care, that is the only adjective that interests us, but you are deteriorating public health, when you turn health workers into villains, as they themselves denounce.
He has left them at the feet of the horses, implying that they are to blame for the disaster you have created. You have made a very serious mistake, perhaps your biggest mistake to date. Now that he is unable to control the pandemic, he is looking to blame health personnel and Asturians, who are the same, who were when he presumed to control the disease. You and your government are failing, not the health workers or the Asturians.
And this contempt of yours for the health personnel occurs precisely when the second wave hits Asturias harder than ever. When you recognize that we are in the worst moment. With a peak of 240 infections on October 11, twice more than the 119 on March 19, the peak of the first wave. You ask us Asturians to be containment dikes, weren't you? That was not what you said to Susana Grisso. What will he say in the next interview they do, when he has to explain that he is no longer the first in the class.
Now he discovers that when outsiders arrive, as happened in the summer, the contagion rate picks up and he is unable to control it. It will turn out that in the end, as we said in VOX that the control of the pandemic has come more from the hand of our isolation and population dispersion, than from the measures of your government.
President, as you say, without health there is no economy, but without toilets there is no health, and you are on your way to losing them, precisely when we are going to need them the most.
But they also lie, yesterday their counselor said that they did not stop treating other health pathologies not related to COVID-19. That is false. The health workers say it, there are problems with other pathologies due to the diversion of resources to the coronavirus, the director of Public Health of the WHO, María Neira, warns of the increase in mortality in other non-COVID pathologies. They are lying, as the President of Simpa says, "do not continue to deceive with oratorical fervor in favor of the Primary."
The surgical activity of the Monte Naranco Hospital will soon be paralyzed due to the lack of personnel and to focus efforts on the coronavirus, the same happens in the Cabueñes Hospital.
If they want to save lives, their verbiage, or their national marketing campaign, which doctors call "oratorical fervor" does not benefit them at all. Healthcare workers want resources to care for patients, and they don't need you to ask to report them when you don't provide resources.
In short, stop using toilets like a clinic, depending on where the air of political marketing blows you. They say it "oratory fervor" and more action, President; do not abandon the rest of severe pathologies as it is happening; recover a greater presence; reward staff remuneration; limited and defined agendas; adequate telephone systems; improvement of triage systems, etcetera. In short, less talking, less "oratorical fervor" as the health personnel say and more acting.
Thank you so much.