The salary increase for healthcare professionals who perform transplants has been stalled for a year and a half.

BarcelonaEvery day in Catalonia, around 200 public health professionals perform transplants, either in the operating room or on call. This means they must be within a maximum of one hour of the hospital in case a compatible organ becomes available for a patient on the waiting list. Last year, 1,344 transplants were performed, almost four per day, and according to data from the Catalan Transplant Organization (OCATT), this is one of the highest rates in the world. These are highly complex procedures that require different profiles working in unison to ensure that organs are harvested as required, transported safely, and transplanted to those who need them. Although this work is essential, the salaries of the workers who make it possible have been frozen for more than a year and a half.

A new contract was signed at the end of 2023.agreement of the Catalan Health Institute (ICS), which represented an injection of €320 million to improve working conditions for all professional categories, especially doctors and nurses. Despite the agreement between the public company and the unions, some loose ends remained that needed to be resolved "in the coming months" after the signing with working groups. One of them was to meet to agree on a price for organ transplants and extractions with the aim of improving and harmonizing salaries, since each public hospital currently pays them differently.

This negotiation was supposed to primarily benefit surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, nursing assistants, and orderlies included in the professional teams that perform transplants at publicly owned centers. However, according to ARA, this group has not met for months, and therefore, the improvement in conditions is not progressing.

"It's very bad. We constantly have to fight for everything," laments Laura Ramió, an anesthesiologist on the transplant team at the Germans Trias i Pujol Hospital in Badalona and the representative of the Médicos de Catalunya union leading the negotiations. She explains that the working group has not met since last October and is unaware of the reasons why the negotiations have been halted.

ICS sources assure that the company's intention is to resume meetings this summer, at the beginning of September at the latest, with a new proposal, and affirm that the sectoral committee has already been informed of the new call. However, the unions deny having received any notification. In addition to Médicos de Catalunya, the unions CCOO, UGT, and SATSE will also sit at the table.

They plan to file a complaint.

It's a complex negotiation because transplants are "a very specific procedure, even depending on the service and organ type," the ICS clarifies. Therefore, a price must be agreed upon for each professional role involved, for each organ removed, and for each organ transplanted.

Ramió doubts that an agreement will be reached soon, as "nothing was advanced" when negotiations were halted. Furthermore, she criticizes the fact that many of the commitments that were included in the ICS's third agreement "have taken a long time to implement and fulfill." "Imagine what has been left out of the agreement and is yet to be negotiated," warns the anesthesiologist.

However, the ICS assures that they will work to "harmonize the remuneration for healthcare as much as possible" and thus reduce the differences that currently exist between workers at different public hospitals.

On the other hand, sources from the Independent Trade Union of Civil Servants (CSIF), which is not represented at the meeting, assure that there are other aspects pending negotiation, such as the price of on-call duty for nurses, technicians, and orderlies. The same sources assure that they are considering filing a complaint because they estimate they have lost a lot of money in the last year and a half and do not trust that the new agreement will include retroactive payment.