The Minister of Health, Alejandro Vázquez, has expressed in Burgos his confidence that the surgical waiting lists will be reduced with the 'peonadas', the outsourcing of operations and the use "to the maximum" of the resources that are available on an ordinary day, after the increase as a result of the suspensions derived from the Covid pandemic.

Vázquez, who opened the 67th National Congress of the Spanish Society of Angiology and Vascular Surgery at the Evolución Forum in the capital of Burgos, recalled that the Ministry of Health intends to reduce surgical waiting lists by opening operating rooms for the afternoons, for which he resorts to 'peonadas' or overtime outside the normal working day, which are offered voluntarily to medicine and nursing staff until December 31.

"I do not know if it will be enough or insufficient," he said, while insisting that "the Ministry has planned the distribution of the waiting list based on three fundamental aspects." Thus, she has pointed out that the first of them is «the maximum use of our resources in ordinary working hours»; the second, he has pointed out, «the maximum use of our resources during extraordinary hours in the afternoon» and, the third, he has added, «the use of the resources that we have in concert with private healthcare».

"With the conjunction of the three aspects, we trust that the waiting list will be reduced and then in December we will see," he said, while the person in charge of regional health has recalled that with this, it is expected to reach in the second half of the year the objective set by the Chairman of the Board, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, to reduce the average delay by at least 21 days in a period of six months.

In the first quarter of this year it stood at 144 days, with a total of 42,574 patients waiting to undergo surgery, reports Ical.