EH Bildu has called on the Basque Government's Department of Health to develop a specific investment plan to adapt Osakidetza's infrastructures and facilities to the current climate emergency, recalling that the heatwaves that have been recurring across Europe since 2003 have become "a major public health problem".
The request was registered by parliamentarian Rebeka Ubera in the Basque Parliament through a non-legislative proposal, considering "urgent and essential the development of plans to prevent the effects of high temperatures on health".
According to Ubera, the devices and protocols implemented to date "are no longer sufficient", given that "in the best of cases, they have served to alleviate the effects of the climate emergency, so comprehensive interventions are needed".
In this context, the initiative proposes "to design and approve a timetable and an investment plan to adapt Osakidetza's infrastructures to the climate emergency, prioritizing spaces where the most critical and most vulnerable population is admitted".
Likewise, EH Bildu's proposal includes the Department of Health agreeing with the rest of the institutions on common criteria and the necessary allocations for the design and renovation of socio-health infrastructures, in order to "improve their response capacity to extreme weather events and adopt measures both in buildings and in the surrounding environment".
The initiative of the pro-independence coalition is part of the development of Law 1/2024 on Energy Transition and Climate Change, a regulation that "defines the steps to be taken to adapt to climate change and focuses very specifically on critical and sensitive infrastructures, within the framework of a global strategy".
Health centers with extreme temperatures
"It is evident that health, outpatient, and hospital infrastructures are among these critical areas, so it is essential to start taking measures to protect the most vulnerable population," the parliamentarian stressed.
For Ubera, the situation "is urgent, because we cannot normalize that people in vulnerable situations suffer extreme temperatures or that, for example, in social and health centers, hospitals or outpatient clinics, both staff and patients have to be at 39 degrees." "That has happened in recent weeks and Health must take this problem seriously to put solutions on the table," he insisted.