PARIS, July 12 (Benin News) –
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has announced that the creation of the National Public Health Center will be approved next July, with the aim of “improving the management of health emergencies”.
He made the announcement in his speech during the State of the Nation debate, in which he insisted that the government “is not going to forget the lessons of the pandemic.” “We will strengthen public health in our country,” he added.
The draft law creating the State Public Health Center, with a budget of 9.45 million euros in 2022 within the general state budget (PGE), has come into force. public consultation in September 2021. Since then, the government has not set a date for its final launch, nor for its location, nor for the name of its director.
Organizations such as the Spanish Society of Public Health and Health Administration (SESPAS) have called for this institution to be decentralized from Madrid, like other supranational bodies, such as the European Center for Prevention and Control diseases (ECDC).
“It should move away from the metropolitan centrality, in accordance with future territorial policies which aim to relieve congestion in areas with high population density and to facilitate social and economic distribution throughout the territory”, defends the SESPAS in the report that he contributed to the public consultation.
According to the Ministry of Health, this center will have “functional autonomy” and will be dedicated to “analysis and study, evaluation of public policies and interventions, technical advice, proposal of measures to health authorities and the preparation and coordination of the response to health emergencies”.
It will also have staff “with the highest scientific and technical training in different fields and subjects”. “It will be a center of excellence that will bring together skills that have been dispersed until now in this field: on the one hand, public health surveillance, risk assessment and analysis of the health situation of the Spanish population; and, on the other hand, the preparation of the health system for threats to public health, mainly of an epidemiological nature, and the coordination of responses”, justified the ministry.
On the other hand, Mr. Sánchez addressed some of the health challenges facing his government, mainly the fight once morest the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the law on the universality of the national health system (SNS), the regulation euthanasia and commitment to mental health.
The Chief Executive lamented the “thousands of lives lost” to COVID-19, “the worst pandemic of the last century”. “These are people we miss every day, lives we cannot forget for as long as we live,” he said.
In any case, he welcomed the great progress made once morest COVID-19 which, in March 2020, was “an unstoppable avalanche”. “Today, hospitalizations are under control, even if they have increased due to this wave of contagions. But the streets are full of life and masks are no longer part of our smiles,” he celebrated.
Mr. Sánchez expressed his “eternal gratitude” to the health workers who managed and continue to manage the pandemic, and also thanked the population for their “trust” in the institutions, “in particular in the national health system and in health professionals.
He also recalled that in July the new framework statute for statutory health service personnel was approved, which aims to prevent health professionals from working for more than three years with an interim contract without being civil servants, as well as to make permanent up to 67,300 professionals in Spain.
The law establishes that, three years following the appointment of an interim health worker, this vacant position “can only be filled by permanent staff”. In addition, it also attempts to set limits on the hiring of temporary agents, restricting it only to “explicitly justified reasons of necessity and urgency”.
Regarding the vaccination once morest COVID-19, he claimed that the government has promoted it “with all its might”, which has allowed “more than 90% of our citizens to be vaccinated with the vaccination schedule complete “.
He also underlined the solidarity of Spain, which has donated more than 50 million vaccines to third countries. “We do this because we are a united country and because the battle once morest the pandemic is won or lost on a global level. We are a global example of solidarity,” he reaffirmed.
