The Isabel Zendal Hospital will be a day center to welcome patients with ALS
A day center that will support 60 patients and their families and a future single-thematic hospital focused on the neurodegenerative disease that lacks treatment and help: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS. With these two steps, the Community of Madrid is committed to providing coverage to these patients from a social and health point of view.. This was conveyed by the Minister of Health, Fátima Matute, who presented the strategic lines of her legislature.
Matute has delved into this and other issues that he considers essential within his roadmap during the briefing with the media.. The star measures are the launch of a day care center for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at the Isabel Zendal Nursing Hospital, which is expected to be operational next February.
This center will have the capacity to house around 60 patients and will have infrastructure known as a third caregiver, designed to create friendly, comfortable spaces that help optimize the care that patients receive.. The center's portfolio of services will include, among others, nursing care, rehabilitation with physiotherapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy and psychological care.. It will also have a bank of technical and technological aids that will be available to patients, such as adapted tablets or canes.. Both initiatives will have their own healthcare personnel..
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Along with this center, the counselor has indicated that the regional Executive continues working on the creation of a pioneering residence dedicated exclusively to comprehensive ALS care, which will be built in the old Puerta de Hierro Hospital and which is expected to be in leaves before the end of the legislature. It will have 190 beds: 120 for mid-stay functional recovery, 20 for palliative care and 50 for the residential center.. The execution of the work has an investment of 73 million euros.
'MadridTake Care'
Matute also highlighted during the meeting the upcoming launch of MadridTeCuida, an information channel on the Community of Madrid's own website that also has a mobile application. Its objective is to provide truthful, effective and accessible information on health issues that combats Internet searches on sites that contain information “whose reliability is not guaranteed.”
It will have a panel with answers to frequently asked questions and, to ensure rigor, health professionals will be the ones who answer the most complex questions.. For simpler questions, the system will have a chatbox that, through artificial intelligence, will answer simple questions.
According to the department, there will be several subjects on which information will be provided: allergies and medications and foods, symptoms of covid-19, digestive problems, skin injuries, care during pregnancy and childbirth, respiratory problems, vaccines, anxiety, depression, insomnia…. To these, new entries will be constantly added.
Lung cancer screening
Prevention, as the person responsible for Health has highlighted, is a main axis of action for the Madrid Ministry. As an example of this, the region hopes to have the design of a pilot study that will allow measuring the integration of its own lung cancer screening program.. This program will revolve around the Cassandra project, designed by the Spanish Society of Pulmonology and Thoracic Surgery (Separ) and developed in collaboration with all scientific societies dedicated to the diagnosis, treatment and research in lung cancer and institutions and patients..
Through this project, the Community of Madrid will seek to prevent and screen not only lung cancer, but also the different diseases caused by tobacco consumption.. There will be a working group within the department.
The new Minister of Health of the community of Madrid, Fátima Matute, during a meeting with the press. WORLD
Likewise, Matute recalled other screening and early detection projects in which Madrid is also working.. For example, within the Prevecolon program, citizens, through pharmacies, will have access from the beginning of next year to kits for diagnosing colon cancer.. In addition, the expansion of Cervicam, the cervical cancer detection program, will continue so that in this term it is expanded to all women between 25 and 65 years old.
More places to address mental health
During his speech, Matute also focused on the need to reinforce the approach to mental health and the pathologies associated with it, paying special attention to the child and youth population.. On this matter, he stressed that the region will invest around eight million euros in expanding the child and youth mental health care network.. This will involve “doubling the places” in the children's and adolescent day hospitals in the Sermas general hospitals and medium-stay intensive treatment units.
Along with this, it has announced the launch of new infrastructure for adolescents and young adults, and that, before the end of 2023, the region will have completed the incorporation of 181 new specialists (including psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, nurses and social workers). of the 370 included in the Mental Health and Addictions Plan and the Suicide Prevention Plan, with a budget of 43 million euros.
Hospital care at home
It is another priority for Madrid to commit to hospital care at home, turning it into homogeneous and coordinated care.. To this end, it is already working to create a home care network that has “a single control center”, from where all the assistance that patients receive will be coordinated, connecting the different levels of care.
It is estimated that the project will begin in the first half of next year and that it will be expanded gradually.. The region, which has 18 public hospitals that offer home hospitalization, estimates that the patients who will benefit most from this initiative will be the elderly and frail, in addition to those patients who have to travel frequently to the hospital.
Professional stabilization
The Community of Madrid has the attraction and retention of professional talent as one of its great priorities in health for the next legislature. For this reason, it is working to convene biennial competition and transfer competitions that will alternate each year in order to achieve greater stabilization of the staff that makes up the Madrid Health Service (Sermas).
On this issue, the counselor has explained that the fact of alternating public job offers (OPE) and transfer competitions will facilitate predictability, creating a fixed structure of calls that will be known in advance by the professionals who want to apply for them.
During the meeting, the head of Madrid's health system also presented the figures that show how the temporary employment rate is being reduced in the region.. Specifically, it has been explained that the community, after the progressive stabilization of more than 15,600 professionals already incorporated into Sermas, will publish before the end of the year the final lists of those approved by the extraordinary process for another 9,574 professionals.. “With this, the temporality will have dropped to 27%”. Likewise, it was indicated in the meeting that before the end of 2024 the process to stabilize another 34,000 professionals must be completed, “reducing temporary employment in the region to 8%.”