The Minister of Health, Mónica García, stated this Tuesday that she trusts that the autonomous communities will support the "new criteria for transparency and traceability" in waiting lists, after the alleged manipulation detected at the Ramón y Cajal Hospital and revealed by the newspaper 'El País'.
In a message published on the social network 'X', García emphasized that "Manipulating waiting lists, deceiving surgeons and patients, is neither new nor penalized," reminding that precisely for this reason the Ministry brought a proposal with new common indicators on waiting lists to the Interterritorial Council of the National Health System (CISNS) in July.
At that meeting, the autonomous communities requested more leeway to analyze and give the green light to these homogeneous criteria, which will serve as the basis for a new royal decree on waiting lists that will replace the one in force since 2003.
The head of Health reiterated that "With patients' health, there is no playing around" and expressed her desire that, after what happened at Ramón y Cajal, the communities now approve these indicators without further delays.
ALLEGED MANIPULATION AT H. RAMÓN Y CAJAL
According to information reported by 'El País', two medical chiefs at the Ramón y Cajal Hospital allegedly artificially reduced the severity of certain patients to improve the statistics of their surgical waiting lists, without informing the responsible surgeons.
The newspaper, which has had access to internal documentation and emails pointing to this alleged alteration, details that 57 patients included in the surgical waiting list of the Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology service were moved from the preferred priority category (intervention before 90 days) to the normal priority category (operation before 180 days). In this way, those responsible had more leeway to ensure that the interventions were carried out within the official deadlines.