Portal de Lorca

www.portaldelorca.com

• Home
• Business
• Hotels
• Restaurants
• News
• Advertisement

Pedro Sosa, councilor spokesman for Izquierda Unida Verdes in the city of Lorca has presented this morning one of the motions to be presented to the Plenary of February, consisting of the necessary studies to see the feasibility of a new hospital in the area of Carraclaca and turn the Rafael Méndez Hospital into a geriatric ..

In 1990 - soon 30 years will be completed - the facilities of the Rafael Méndez de Lorca Hospital were inaugurated and put into service before the collapse of the former Santa Rosa de Lima Hospital, which was the health reference institution in our municipality since 1974.

At the time of its inauguration, Lorca had a population that barely exceeded 67,000 inhabitants.

Closed for demographic purposes in 2018 the population of Lorca currently exceeds the figure of 93,000 people registered in our municipality.

Very similar population growth dynamics have been experienced throughout these almost three decades in all the municipalities that are grouped in Area III of Health: Águilas, Totana, Puerto Lumbreras and Aledo.

Since its very inauguration, and leaving aside the multiple deficiencies in what has to do with the provision of health care and on which we continuously bring to this full political initiatives from all groups, the Rafael Méndez Hospital has been criticized by part of its users for its strange architectural configuration, for its inclined disposition on the ground in which it sits that forces users to overcome walking a whole slope to access a good part of its facilities, due to the lack of perspectives around necessary future expansions that had those who decided to place it on the slopes of a mountain range that blocked its growth in the north, due to the inefficient energy of its facilities, or due to the insufficient parking spaces of vehicles that users of the hospital center suffer daily.

We believe that after three decades of service this sanitary infrastructure will not last another decade without the quality of the health services and services of a user population that has risen significantly since the start-up of the Hospital is even worse.

Not in vain, our Hospital does not even appear in the Hospital Excellence Index that is prepared annually and in its latest edition of 2018 has designated 4 hospitals in the municipality of Murcia (one of them private) and one fifth in the city of Cartagena among the top five positions in the Murcian regional ranking of hospital excellence.

That absence of Lorca and its reference hospital in this type of comparative lists brings about a set of factors in which, in addition to the structural deficiencies cited, other bleeding realities -which we have to denounce- are also added, such as the one that indicates that Area III of health presents a serious discrimination of its "ratios" of medical specialists and nurses in relation to the regional average, or the one that informs us that we are in line with all the indicators of expenditure per user in public hospitals of the Region, up to three times less than in the Virgen de la Arrixaca Hospital in Murcia.

We know that the decision regarding the planning of new health infrastructures of the relevance and economic cost of a new hospital is a complex issue.

From the beginning of its claim by its users, and by the political institutions closest to them, until it becomes a reality, they pass years and even decades, so it is necessary that in the face of signs of collapse and exhaustion of the health infrastructures of the Hospital Rafael Méndez, the City of Lorca begins to put on the political agenda a demand that will take a long time to become reality but, as in all important things, has to take its first steps at the right time.

We believe that there are alternatives for a new and better location of the Rafael Méndez de Lorca Hospital in the extensive public lands existing in Carraclaca, with a better disposition on the ground than the current location, with a perfect communication with the Mediterranean highway that would be solved without hardly economic cost, and we believe that there can also be alternatives to the current dependencies of the hospital for its conversion into a geriatric hospital, which, as all studies have pointed out, is a service of a social nature that will be widely demanded in the immediate future.

Therefore, we will demand for this motion the following agreement: "The City of Lorca, as an institution closer to citizens and users of the Rafael Méndez de Lorca Regional Hospital, will commission companies or specialized institutions to write a study on the opportunity and viability to plan the construction of a new hospital center in Lorca to replace the current health infrastructure of the current hospital. "

Source: IU-verdes Lorca