No land for the new Ebro hospital: the Government halts the planned plan due to flood risk
The Generalitat assures that it is working on a plan B while professionals denounce that healthcare in the south of the country is "third world"
TortosaThe story of the new reference hospital in Terres de l'Ebre continues to accumulate chapters. In 2006, the Minister of Health, Marina Geli, announced the construction of a complex on the outskirts of Tortosa, a reference hospital for 180,000 people from Baix Ebre, Montsià, Terra Alta and Ribera d'Ebre. Three months later, the Generalitat stated this on an information board located on land in the Partial Plan of La Farinera, where the centre was planned. But almost twenty years later there is no hospital, nor land to build it. This Friday, the Generalitat has recognised that after delays and a thousand vicissitudes - economic crisis, budget cuts and a bureaucratic and technical labyrinth, old territorial and neighbourhood political grievances - the plots that the Tortosa City Council had acquired in the previous term to definitively house the new health complex are not valid due to their nature.
The project has thus been discarded in that location. However, this problem had been on the table for almost two years. The Terres de l'Ebre Urban Planning Commission had approved the recognition of the special regime of the municipality in terms of flooding in order to be able to redirect the project, but the urban and administrative procedures initiated have not come to fruition. The Generalitat and the City Council are already working on a plan B, of which no further details are available. But the news has only angered professionals and users due to the delay in time that the new scenario implies and above all due to the deterioration of health care in the south of Catalonia.
"We could already sense it, right? After the floods last November in l'Horta de València, it was even more obvious that new land would have to be sought," explains Cinta Galiana from Tortosa.Two weeks later she had an abdominal operation at the Virgen de la Cinta Hospital, the reference centre in the area for the moment. "I can only speak well of the professional and humane treatment. On the other hand, the care has been deficient in terms of infrastructure; on some floors the rooms are too narrow to accommodate the patients and the medical equipment. Often you have to share a room with a curtain in the middle that does not guarantee privacy," she laments.
The list of complaints is even longer: consultation rooms without ventilation, with some set up in the old assembly hall; obsolete operating theatres designed fifty years ago; sanitary equipment in the corridors and overcrowding in the waiting rooms. It is also the only hospital centre of the Catalan Institute of Health (ICS) that does not have robotic surgery. The professionals who work there speak of "third world" conditions and even of a health emergency. The building will soon be half a century old and despite the improvements that have been made, it suffers from maintenance deficits.
Archaeological remains
To hammer the nail home, the works to extend the centre, which began a few months ago to guarantee the quality of care while the new hospital is being built from top to bottom, have had to be halted due to the discovery of archaeological remains, which must now be analysed. This is not so strange if one takes into account that the Virgen de la Cinta was built in the mid-seventies on the edge of the historic centre of Tortosa, on the walled enclosure of the Sitjar hill and the 17th century coastal path. According to the Catalan Health Service (CatSalut) and the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage, the archaeological work will begin imminently to determine the scope of the findings and decide how to rethink the extension project.
The project planned to locate the new pharmacy service and logistics space on an underground floor, and although the Generalitat's intention is to make the conservation of the remains compatible with the continuity of the work, there are several questions. Three possible scenarios are intuited: that the project can be continued by relocating the underground services and giving up a car park; that it will be necessary to rethink the entire work and another tender for the work must be held; or, in the worst case, that the extension must be given up and the construction company compensated.
For all these reasons, scepticism has increased in recent days in the face of a situation of paralysis with two major fronts open: the halt in the works to extend the old building and the accumulated delays in the project for the future hospital that was to be carried out in parallel. Last Tuesday, some 200 workers from the Hospital gathered at the entrances to the centre to demand solutions and ask for the continuation of the extension works. And the mobilisation will not be a one-off, because the staff committee has already decided to call the protest on a weekly basis until the works are resumed.
Health professionals are raising their voices to denounce that the complexity of care cannot be faced from a reference hospital that is in deficit like the current one. According to them, "without the expansion, the loss of professionals and quality of care will be irreversible" and "there is no time to wait for a new university hospital for fifteen more years." In fact, the doctors declare themselves at their limit and overwhelmed by the situation.
At a meeting with the Platform for a New Hospital in Terres de l'Ebre, the Generalitat has promised to explain, as soon as possible, the future actions that the government plans to take to get out of this impasse. Meanwhile, the workers have hung a banner on the façade of the building to count the days that the extension works have been stopped. This Friday it has already been 72. Time passes and this marker is going up.
