Torrevieja Hospital Radiologist Shortage Concerns Highlighted

Once again, the UGT union at Torrevieja Hospital has denounced the serious shortage of medical personnel in the radiodiagnosis service and the referral of patients to other hospitals to perform urgent tests due to a lack of staff at the once award-winning hospital.

According to the Federation of Public Services of UGT PV, in this hospital there are only five radiologists on the morning shift to cover a total population of 204,000 people 24 hours a day. That is, a ratio of one specialist for every 40,800 potential patients. This is an insufficient number of radiologists to undertake the activity since a staff of at least twelve specialists should be available.

Furthermore, the Torrevieja hospital does not have a radiologist in person at night, on weekends and during holidays. To solve this problem, the hospital has opted to continue with the service established by Ribera Salud of outsourcing teleradiology tests to a platform outside the Valencian Community.

This solution adds more problems to those already generated by the lack of radiologists, such as the overload of personnel due to the additional management that this entails, the unjustified increase in tests that use ionizing radiation due to not having a radiologist in person to perform ultrasounds, as well as the delay in diagnoses due to problems with the platform.

It should be noted that these radiology personnel external to the Ministry of Health do not have access to the patient’s clinical history, which also generates clinical uncertainties with the consequent increase in unnecessary tests due to not having all the patient’s information. Finally, an increase in contrast tests has also been detected, which could be avoided with an in-person radiologist.

The hospital management is aware of these problems and requested to declare the uncovered places as difficult to cover in March 2023 and November 2023 without obtaining a response from the administration so far.

UGT requests an immediate solution to the problems and shows its concern about the increase in unjustified and avoidable tests with ionizing radiation, as well as the absence of a radiologist at the Torrevieja Hospital in the uncovered areas.

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