Ceuta doctors facing "100 weekly hours" on duty, according to a tweet

Ceuta: A tweet claims doctors are working 100 hours per week

Three shifts of 24 hours and four seven-hour postings. Seventy-two hours plus twenty-eight: one hundred. This is the calculation circulating on social media regarding the work week of doctors in Ceuta, which, when projected over a month, brings the figure up to 400 hours. The discussion about what is happening in the healthcare system of this autonomous city mixes working conditions, national politics, and the debate over who has the right to be attended.

How many hours per week are Ceuta doctors working?

One hundred, according to that calculation: three 24-hour shifts total 72; four seven-hour days add 28. Extrapolated, this amounts to 400 hours per month. The breakdown combines shifts and on-call duties, which explains why the issue has become a hot topic. Based on this premise are crossed two narratives: one viewing it as an administrative anomaly, and the other framing it in terms of the service saturation of a frontier city.

What does the Ministry of Health respond?

Little, according to one thread participant: the Ministry of Health claims they are uninvolved. Parallel to this has emerged the idea that linking saturation with care for migrant populations is xenophobia—a diagnosis attributed by one user to the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and debated fiercely. Some respond by citing the health card as a triage criterion, while others accuse the Executive branch of chronicizing the problem. The political reading goes elsewhere: if the government were of a different sign, some argue, the medical staff would be on strike for weeks.

Why are doctors staying in Ceuta, according to the thread

One participant argues that doctors are lacking across Spain and that he, if he were a doctor in Ceuta, would have already moved. Another reminds people that they do not perform this work for free, as these shifts are paid. It is not volunteering, the thread emphasizes, but compensated work.

One hundred hours a week, 400 per month, according to that calculation. And on the table is an escape valve mentioned half-jokingly: medical leave. With that scenario, the question raised in the thread is not why there are no doctors in Ceuta, but why those who remain are still there.