Healthcare is being one of the most addressed areas in the Andalusian electoral campaign, which is about to end. Delays in appointments with general practitioners and for surgeries, difficulties in filling healthcare professional positions in rural areas, precariousness, and especially the management of breast cancer screenings have been recurring themes.
Of all this, and of the proposals of the Andalusian PSOE, we speak in Demócrata with María Ángeles Prieto, who has extensive healthcare experience: in addition to being a nurse, she holds a degree in Political Science and Sociology, with a master's degree in Public Health and Healthcare Management. Furthermore, she is a doctor in Health Sciences and a professor at the Andalusian School of Public Health. In the last legislature, she was the spokesperson for Healthcare for her party in the Parliament of Andalusia and, currently, she is also the secretary of Health.
Question: How do you assess the management of the Popular Party in the healthcare sector over the last four years?
Answer: Well, a significant mess, an intentional mess of our public healthcare. This is something that anyone who listens to me confirms, any citizen is experiencing it in their own experience, with increasing difficulty in accessing healthcare services: appointments in primary care are no less than 2-3 weeks, waiting lists continue to increase. We have the worst surgical waiting list in all of Spain, in all autonomous communities. During these four years [of the PP legislature], we have been at the forefront in terms of people waiting and waiting times, both in the surgical waiting list and in the external consultation waiting list.
The system is absolutely collapsed, hospitals are overloaded, there has been a very significant cut in staff that has generated these waiting lists. Professionals are exhausted, with very precarious working conditions and significant workload due to these staff cuts. And all this has been intentionally caused because Moreno Bonilla has had more budget than ever during these four years, there was no justification for the staff cuts.
This has generated absolutely unbearable waiting lists and the perfect excuse to divert 4.7 billion euros to private [medicine] like never before, 72% more in agreements than in 2018. The system is on the verge of collapse and in a very worrying situation.
Q: You have been especially critical of the issue of screenings. How have you experienced it?
A: Screenings are the tip of the iceberg, it is the clearest example of Moreno Bonilla's health policy: absolute neglect, absolute indifference to public healthcare. They have not dedicated money, time, or effort to the management of public healthcare.
A system like that of screenings, which had been implemented in Andalusia for decades and worked perfectly, is now absolutely broken. We know that the head of the Radiology service at the Virgen Rocío Hospital, where more cases have accumulated, warned months in advance. But it has not only happened in Seville, there are cases throughout Andalusia.
The head of the radiology service at the Virgen del Rocío Hospital warned about the accumulation of diagnostic tests and that they could not analyze them due to a lack of staff, because in this service more than half of the staff had been cut and radiologists on leave were not being replaced. In response to that call and that alert, the Government of the Junta de Andalucía's response was a 25 million cut in staff at the Virgen del Rocío.
The last alert call from professionals about the critical situation that was occurring was in May 2025, and they did nothing and covered it up. And we learned about this tragedy in October because journalists from Cadena SER gave voice to the women from the Amama association, who reported that they had not received the results of mammograms they had had months, even two years earlier, and that women were appearing with advanced cancer.
And what did the government of the Junta de Andalucía do? What did the president of the Junta de Andalucía do? What did Moreno Bonilla do? Cover up, ignore, threaten, and insult these women. If it hadn't been for them, we wouldn't have known about this. Therefore, the great concern is to know what else might be happening. This is the tip of the iceberg and a clear example of the destruction of public healthcare and of an insensitive government that, when faced with problems, covers them up, uses the entire propaganda machine to cover them up, and solves nothing. And more than six months later, even today we do not know how many women have been affected, nor what their clinical situation is, nor how many have developed breast cancer.
And, of course, we don't know why it really happened or who is responsible. And this is an example of what may be happening in other cases: we know about the colon cancer screening, where there are hospitals that have already warned that they have pending tests of positive stool blood tests awaiting a colonoscopy for months. The situation is very worrying, they have destroyed and intentionally ruined public healthcare to benefit private healthcare.
Q: Let's move on to the proposals of the Andalusian Socialist Party: I read that they wanted to reduce waiting lists for appointments in primary care, so that any citizen who requested an appointment within 48 hours could see their family doctor.
A: The absolute priority is to recover Primary Care, which has been severely punished: staff numbers have been cut, health centers have been turned into places where professionals barely have time to meet demand, prevention programs for health promotion, community work programs, and the meaning of Primary Care have been lost. Consultancies have been closed, emergency points in rural areas, which are particularly hard hit, have been closed.
What is our proposal? To immediately recover accessibility to Primary Care. A healthcare system makes no sense if it is not accessible. People, when they are sick, must be able to be seen, they must be able to be attended by their doctors, by their family doctors. That is why recovering primary care appointments within 24 or 48 hours is an absolute priority: we must put an immediate end to appointments in three weeks, which is the norm in Andalusia.
To achieve this, we must rehire the 18,000 professionals who were laid off after the pandemic, because it is absolutely false that there are 30,000 more professionals. [In the PP] they have never been able to prove it. Unions flatly deny it: there are not 30,000 more professionals in the healthcare system. What we have confirmed is that 18,000 professionals were laid off after the pandemic and that it is precisely this figure that unions are demanding to reach the average ratios of other autonomous communities.
These 18,000 professionals must be recovered, the decree guaranteeing waiting times must be recovered, which is being systematically breached: guarantee of a diagnostic test in 30 days, a consultation with a hospital specialist in 60, and surgical interventions between 90 and 180 days depending on the pathology. This was in effect before 2018 in Andalusia and this Government has completely ignored it.
To this end, María Jesús Montero commits to providing an additional 3 billion euros in funding for healthcare each year: out of the 5.7 billion that Andalusia will have with the new funding model, 3 billion will go to public healthcare to strengthen, to improve, to recover everything we have lost in these years.
And two more very important aspects: the first is a specific plan to reverse the cuts in Primary Care in rural areas, but also in the CHARES [high-resolution hospital centers] and in the district hospitals that have suffered a progressive and intense dismantling in these years. Services that existed in district hospitals have disappeared, they have lost professionals, they have lost specialties, and people who could previously receive care and be operated on near their homes now have to go to the capitals, as they did more than 30 years ago. Strengthening the rural area, recovering the entire network of district hospitals and CHARES, which was a socialist healthcare model that aimed precisely to guarantee access no matter where you lived. And, secondly, a very important issue for us: to stop and reverse the privatization of our healthcare. Concerts must be reversed, this drain of public money to the private sector must be stopped.
Q: Anything else to add?
A: We are considering the recovery of Andalusian public healthcare in two phases. The first phase is to recover what has been lost. But this is not the only challenge: the challenge is to reposition Andalusian public healthcare at the forefront of healthcare models, not only in our country, but in the most advanced countries. Andalusia was a pioneer in healthcare, in the healthcare system, in care models, in organizational models, in research, in technology. It was a pioneer some years ago and we must recover that prestige and that spearhead and have an innovative model, not only for the citizens, for the guarantee and quality of care, but also as a very important element of motivation for professionals, so that professionals want to work and commit again to healthcare and a healthcare system that makes them grow and that allows them to develop professionally. And of which they can feel proud.
IN DETAIL
The election campaign does not rest and Prieto only has a few minutes free on the weekend. His speech, by videoconference, is very well-articulated, he knows the subject perfectly and he is breaking down, one after another, the arguments against the PP's management and their proposals for improvement. On Sunday we will know the result of the campaign.