When the only newspapers were on paper and the readers wrote “Letters to the editor”, a classic of the subgenre were the letters from patients or relatives giving thanks after a hospital trance. They can still be read in some media, although today they are mostly published on social networks. You know what I’m talking about, we’ve read them many times, we’ve even written them: that warm message in which you begin by saying that you recently suffered a serious health problem, or someone in your family, and once the scare is over you want to thank them for the work and delivery of the doctors, nurses, assistants, administrators, ambulances, etc., from the hospital such and such plant, who treated you, treated you, cared for you and even healed you. They are usually very emotional letters, because rarely are we as grateful as when they have saved our lives or given humane treatment in our worst hours.
I remembered those letters these days, with the strike that the Madrid primary care doctors and pediatricians have just temporarily suspend after more than a month, in addition to go out on the street, attempting a confinement in the council, and all kinds of protest actions. And it occurred to me that perhaps we should write them letters of gratitude as if they had saved our sick daughter’s life or made a painful postoperative period more bearable. Overall, her actions are still a way to keep alive and prevent a particularly critical patient from worsening or becoming chronic: public health. In this case, the Madrid public health system, which every so often appears in the emergency room half bled dry by a few neoliberal stab wounds.
But instead of letters of gratitude, I read the opposite in comments on the news and social networks: criticism and mockery because they lifted the strike for a few weeks, coinciding with Christmas. Some lazy, that is what they are, of course: after two exhausting and emotionally devastating years due to the pandemic, and after many months with overwhelmed primary care, saturated consultations, and the many problems that the system was already dragging, they make a strike of more than a month (which implies significant economic losses), sabotaged by the government picket with a minimum of maximum services and subjected to the neglect of Ayuso (who trusts that they will run out and divide and give in to political and media pressure and end up surrendering), and not we don’t even allow them a truce to take a breath and decide next steps.
Some lazy and ungrateful, that apparently the effect of the pandemic applause has worn off and now they expect something more, I don’t know, decent working conditions, a fair payment for their greatest workload, that they don’t have to be all the day covering with their hands the waterways that their rulers open with an ax in the system.
Now that it’s time to make summaries of the year and choose the protagonists of 2022, I vote for the workers and public health workers, doctors and not only doctors, in Madrid and in other communities where the discontent is also heating up the spirits of the collective. I am one of those who think that public health does not “defend itself” alone, but that it must be defended. And we cannot leave that defense in the hands of its professionals, who have enough to defend their labor rights. The defense of public health is up to them, but also or above all ours, the citizens. And I don’t know if we are giving them all the necessary support to sustain a fight like the one that has thrown Ayuso out. And much more that they will need after Christmas.
So, in the manner of the classic letters, I do want to thank all those workers and public health workers who care for, treat, care for and even try to heal our health system. Thanks a lot.