The spokesman for the Municipal Group of Citizens (cs) in the Cumbres Mayores City Hall and candidate for mayor in that town, José Félix Delgado, denounced today the “serious dismantling” that, little by little, the Riotinto Hospital is suffering, which provides service to numerous municipalities in the regions of the mining basin, the Sierra and the Andévalo. “We are seeing and suffering how services to citizens are progressively being lost, something that poses a great risk to the health of the citizens of all these municipalities,” he criticized.
Delgado explained that a few days ago the neighbors received the news that the hospital was left without a radiologist on duty, something that would force patients who need urgent tests such as a CT scan or an ECHO to be transferred to the Juan Ramón Jiménez Hospital in Huelva. According to him, he highlighted, in the case of the citizens of Cumbres Mayores, a distance of 150 kilometers separates them from this hospital in the Huelva capital “with the risk that this entails for our health.” “And let’s not talk about other municipalities that are even further away, such as Encinasola,” he added.
For example, he assured, if someone suffers an accident that causes internal bleeding and requires a CT scan to find out where the bleeding is and to intervene, they have to travel to the Juan Ramón Jiménez, which means almost an hour more on the way. “Clearly, in severe cases, this additional travel time to the hospital poses a serious risk to the life of the patient,” he noted.
In his opinion, this progressive abandonment has been taking place since Ciudadanos left the Government of the Junta after the last regional elections and it is necessary that the city councils of all the affected municipalities “raise their voices to denounce a situation that poses a serious danger to the citizens and a comparative grievance -another one- with respect to other towns in the province, which do have quick access to public health services”.
Protests at the Riotinto Hospital
Delgado recalled that there have also been protests recently at the gates of the regional hospital due to the closure of the Internal Medicine plant or the elimination of services such as Urology, a closure that the Junta de Andalucía denied but which was denounced by both workers from the hospital itself as neighbors and mayors of the area.
For all this, he stressed that for him, as a candidate for Mayor of Cumbres Mayores, it will be a priority to demand “the return of all the services that have been lost and improvements both in the hospital itself and in the accesses to it.” As he recalled, for the residents of Cumbres Mayores, the transfer to the Riotinto Hospital must be carried out along the national highway 435, which is in a “deplorable” state, with the additional risk that this also entails for patients and emergency professionals.
