The year ends with a great wave of mobilizations, strikes and demonstrations in order to demand action, decision and will on the part of the administration and institutions to improve the situation of doctors throughout the national territory.
The pandemic, which strained the already battered reality we were enduring, has led us to a chronic lack of resources due to a lack of adequate planning and investment, and an increase in casualties among staff, preventing the necessary stable relationship between doctor and patient: longitudinality in primary care is a health protection factor. We miss initiatives for the retention of talent, which causes our specialists to emigrate to other countries after completing their MIR training, where they are offered better working and professional conditions.
And all this makes up the perfect storm that threatens to sweep away one of the fundamental pillars of our welfare state and the model of equity and universality that we have been so proud of for decades.
The medical profession is supported, in addition to science, by values (respect, responsibility and maintenance of competencies, among others) and deontology. This constitutes medical professionalism, the commitment to quality, safety and efficiency of the medical services that we provide to citizens and that guarantees the trust that society places in us.
And it is these principles that make it an ethical duty to warn about situations like the current one and to insist that solutions cannot be taken from doctors. We demand greater participation in decision-making and we offer ourselves as advisers due to our experience and responsibility in healthcare, teaching and research issues.
That is why we took to the streets armed with gowns and stethoscopes, as we have done before and as we will do when necessary, because we would not have learned anything if we returned to the “old abnormality”, with short-term solutions and without facing a deep and consensus that we all deserve.