“The illusion lasts for a while,” says Dr. Jaume Sellarès, in the CAP on my street, named Sardenya, a temple of health for the neighborhood’s pensioners, who when leaving cross the street without looking at the traffic lights, the very immortal ones. And how much the neighborhood loves and values these health professionals!
And why don’t they seem burnt out if the illusion is ephemeral and the work overflowing? It works like a CAP, it attends like a CAP but it is an EAP (primary care team), a kind of cooperative. “In thirty years, medicine has come a long way. And technology not to mention. The health administration, on the other hand, has not changed”, observes Dr. Sellarès, taking advantage of the calm of the day of minimum services. Many visits have been rescheduled but those who came urgently were attended to more quickly than usual. It is not tense calm –as the classics said–, it is dead calm. “Yesterday they might not attend me but they told me that today they might. And it has gone quite well”, says Alba Castellví, 22 years old.
Several people protest with banners during a joint demonstration of Catalan medical and educational unions, in the Sant Jaume square
Few people in the corridors: a young woman with symptoms of anxiety, a pensioner filling in an alphabet soup, some baby. And the typical carousel of institutional messages on the screens: “In the face of a conflict, manage emotions…”.
The cooperative spirit suits this EAP well. They are agile with the procedures. That of a professional having to endorse a prescription for diapers made by another doctor seems to them –among us– an absurd gesture of distrust and a desire to subtract time for the patient. “The bureaucracy is excessive and it does not prevent corruption either. Primary care in Catalonia will not improve only by injecting funds, but by better organization. The figures for primary care physicians per inhabitant are in the medium-high range for Europe. It is the organization that burns the doctors”, says Dr. Sellarès.
