The healthcare system is at odds with the Spanish government, which will have to deal with two simultaneous healthcare strikes this winter. The Ministry of Health has been negotiating a new framework statute for months—the law that regulates the working conditions of healthcare professionals in Spain and which hasn't been updated in over 20 years—but the back-and-forth between the various unions involved has caused tensions across all professions within the system, who are now preparing for two months of protests. The reasons for protesting are similar in their basic structure, but have some specific characteristics. On the one hand, the medical unions have already made it clear that they wanta single statuteSeparately, the unions that exclusively regulate the working conditions of doctors, unlike other healthcare workers, have announced a separate statute. On the other hand, the other unions negotiating the statute, including the main nurses' union, Satse, have accused the Ministry of Health of neglecting their interests due to "parallel negotiations" with doctors. For all these reasons, unions on both sides will return to the streets to force the ministry to listen to their respective demands at a time when hospitals and primary care centers are already beginning to feel strained due to the flu epidemic. On the one hand, Doctors of Catalonia, the largest medical union in Spain, has announced four days of strike action on December 9th and 10th and January 14th and 15th, following the strike on October 3rd, which It brought together hundreds of professionals at the doors of the Health DepartmentFurthermore, the union warns that this time "the protests will not stop, but will continue until the administration addresses their main demand," namely, a single statute that exclusively regulates the healthcare, organizational, and labor aspects of doctors. These four days of strike action will be mirrored nationwide through... The Association for a Medical and Professional Statute (APEMYF)The platform they jointly promoted with 16 medical organizations for the achievement of their own statute.

With the resumption this Wednesday of vaccination with AstraZeneca of the population aged between 55 and 65, now the segment that is most unprotected is those aged between 66 and 79, which will have to wait for more Pfizer vaccines to arrive, possibly in the month of May. However, experts believe that vaccination should be expedited in this group because they are people at risk. "It is worrying that they are not being vaccinated because they are the second most vulnerable group," says Quique Bassat, ICREA researcher at the Institute for Global Health in Barcelona (ISGlobal), a centre promoted by the La Caixa Foundation. "At the time you have covered the major dependents and those over 80 years - although they have not yet finished vaccinated, and this is also inexplicable - the next vulnerable group are people over 65 years," says Bassat, who points out that in many cases are more at risk because they are still active people and with "more mobility and exposure than people who are immobilized or in residences". The president of the College of Physicians of Barcelona, Jaume Padrós, also agrees in saying that they are a vulnerable group: "They are people who live at home, healthy, who are not in residences, who have comorbidities, which are those who fill the hospitals and are the cases that are complicated".