Joshua Parfitt
DEMANDS to re-nationalise one of north Costa Blanca’s biggest hospitals are growing after exposes have revealed bizarre outsourcing practices.
Last month news broke that patients at Denia’s Marina Salud hospital were being sent to a ‘lorry in the carpark’ for MRI scans as waiting lists for in-house procedures were getting longer and longer.
And now a leading campaign group have denounced the hospital for treating patients with dermatological conditions via photographs.
A statement from La Plataforma en Defensa de la Sanidad Pública de la Marina Alta read nurses were taking pictures of skin-based medical issues and sending them to ‘an unknown third party’.
The photographs were sent ‘without the consent or knowledge’ of the patients to an out-sourced private company due to a chronic lack of in-house specialist doctors.
It comes as the laboratory of Clinical and Biological Analysis, Microbiology and Pathological Anatomy was also re-privatised after a disastrous flirtation with the open market in 2012.
During this period, the lab suffered from a lack of equipment and personnel, meanwhile workers lost many labour rights and saw their jobs undercut by cost-cutting market forces.
The Plataforma campaign group met last week with Denia’s councillor for health, David Fernández, to discuss the Valencian Generalitat’s pledge to re-nationalise the hospital in 2015.
A statement said the town hall were ‘deceiving’ voters as no ‘concrete steps’ had been taken to purchase the hospital from its private owners.
“The department of health asked us, once again, to perform an act of faith in his good will,” the statement read.
“The councillor was unable to answer most of the questions we had prepared. It is not known how or when the hospital will return to being a public company or with direct government management.”
