Opinion SIMAP Dénia: Confrontation between Sanitat and the toilets of the Marina Alta

Being a health professional and working at Marina Salud has always been much less attractive than working directly for the Department of Health. Professionals from this region work more hours a year and earn less salary than their colleagues from Gandía or Villajoyosa, despite the fact that the three departments are public.

For the SIMAP of Denia, this differential fact has as a consequence the great youth and turnover of the staff. People come to Denia to take baggage; experience and points to then go to work in other departments, unless you are a resident of the region.

Toilets at the Dénia Hospital (file)

The harsh working conditions offered by Marina Salud, the salary and other social improvements, have remained unchanged since the crisis, despite the sharp increase in the cost of living from 2014 to the present, with a CPI of 17,4%. In the summer of 2022, the representatives of the workers and Ribera Salud reached an agreement on the II Collective Bargaining Agreement, which improved some aspects of remuneration and working hours, although falling well below the conditions of their counterparts from the Ministry and the CPI.

While waiting for its publication by the labor authority, and inappropriately, the Ministry of Health has meddled in the agreement, pointing out that there are clauses that could harm you financially, when in global terms this agreement is very beneficial. All this despite the fact that the agreement expires one month before the end of the concession contract and we pass into the hands of the Ministry. At this time, the agreement reached in August between the workers and Marina Salud, the legitimate negotiators, is blocked and prosecuted, pending the signaling of the trial.

A second grievance of the Ministry towards the workers of Marina Salud and the rest of the current and old concessions has been the publication of the scale of merits for the extraordinary contest. The scale modifies the existing one up to now and in practice removes any possibility of obtaining a position under equal conditions, since it does not value the time worked in a concession-type public department.

The rejection of the professionals to this second measure of the Ministry has been unanimous. In a matter of days, a platform has been formed with hundreds of those affected from the five departments, to file a collective complaint requesting precautionary measures that paralyze the contest-opposition until the scale is modified. At the same time, the unions of the sector will support the individual complaints that are filed against the scale.

In short, to the few attractions of being part of the Marina Salud staff, managed by a company that applies harsh working conditions, we now add the two recent measures of the Ministry of Health; one to block the collective agreement and another to put obstacles so that the workers present themselves to the contest-opposition. Faced with these terrible expectations, the flight of toilets is accelerating, fed up with waiting for a solution that they increasingly see farther away, a few days after the Ministry communicates to Marina Salud that the concession will end on January 31, 2024.

SIMAP is convinced that the population of the Marina Alta will face some very hard years until the health situation returns to normal. The Denia Health Department has a staff of doctors and professionals that is increasingly scarce and demoralized, which has lost confidence in the rectors of the Department, the same ones that were going to bring the long-awaited reversal. Very bad start.