The number of patients attended to in the health centers of Ibiza and Formentera has fallen by 7.5% this year, according to the activity data provided by the management of the Pitiusas Health Department. Those responsible for the Primary Care of the Pitiusas attribute this drop in demand to the reduction in covid cases as well as to the new policy of care for contagions. It should be recalled that the first months of 2021 were the most intense moments of the pandemic in terms of number of cases and deaths.
The fall in care in health centers is recorded both in consultations with family doctors, as well as in those of Pediatrics and nursing, emphasis is place on the data recorded in the first six months of this year. “The Primary Care management considers this drop to be normal, given the reduction in the volume of care provided for covid”, they say, before pointing out that both face-to-face and telephone care has been reduced.
Family and community medicine consultations attended to 8.6% fewer patients between January 1st and June 30th. In this period of time, the professionals of this specialty have attended 282,496 appointments, a figure that last year, in the same period of time, reached almost 310,000 (a total of 309,197).
Health center and at home appointments drop
In these six months, not only has the total number of appointments attended fallen, but also the percentage of these appointments that have been made at home. In the first half of 2021, doctors at the health centers of Ibiza and Formentera visited a total of 2,989 patients in their own homes, almost 1% of the total number of appointments attended. This year, that figure is 0.7%, three tenths of a percent less, according to the data. The rest of the consultations, a total of 280,259, have been made in the Primary Care facilities.
The management assures that the average delay for a family medical appointment in the outpatient clinics of the Pitiusas is five days. “At the end of last year this indicator was at 14 days”. The users have been complaining for some time that the waits for these consultations are much higher. As explained by the management, the waiting time varies depending on the health center and the professional. In general, the delay is higher when appointments are requested for doctors whose quotas are mainly made up of elderly people with multiple pathologies, since they tend to come more to the health center, than when it comes to doctors whose patients are almost all young healthy people.
Appointments in Pediatrics
In the case of Primary Care Pediatrics consultations, the reduction has been 7.5%, going from almost 50,000 appointments attended in the first six months of 2021 (49,703) to 45,961 in the same period of this year. The management team says that the average waiting time for these young patients was four days on June 30th, half the time recorded at the end of 2021.
What has decreased the least during the first half of this year has been the number of nursing consultations. Last year, between January and June 2022 Primary Care nurses attended a total of 232,531 appointments, some 15,000 fewer than in the same period last year, when this figure was 247,865.
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