Medical strike: No non-urgent appointments or surgeries for four days

Four-day medical strike: only vital emergencies will be treated

Four days of industrial action, two weekends within the schedule, and minimum services that rise precisely because the strike falls on a bridge day. The medical strike already underway suspends all appointments and all non-urgent surgeries. Only vital emergencies remain open: heart attacks, serious accidents, brain hemorrhages. Everything else goes to the back of the queue.

The warning circulating these days is simple: if you have a doctor's appointment this week, do not go, because it is most likely you will not be seen. The waiting list does not freeze during the strike. It is parked.

Only vital emergencies: what is treated during the strike

Four days without scheduled activity. Care is limited to what cannot wait, and that limit is set more by professional ethics than by written rules: a heart attack does not understand the union calendar. The rest, appointments, diagnostic tests, and non-urgent operating theaters, are rescheduled.

There is the arithmetic trap. Each day of stopped operating theater adds interventions to the trinc month's list, and the system does not have plenty of gaps. A case circulating these days, according to a participant's account, illustrates this: a woman from Madrid, 47 years of Social Security contributions and early retired at 72, waited one year and three months for rehabilitation sessions after tearing her knee ligaments on a bus. She lives a five-minute walk from the Gregorio Marañón Hospital. The strike did not create that wait. It extends it.

How much does a doctor lose by supporting the strike?

300 euros daily deducted from the payslip, according to the calculation managed by a healthcare worker in the forum. Four days, 1,200 euros. That same calculation explains why, according to the account, most of those supporting the walkout will do so for only one day. Few payslips are willing to swallow that cut out of conviction.

Some say it without mincing words: with a decent salary, four days of strike is a luxury. And here emerges the contradiction running through the entire issue. To the same collective asked to have vocation, they are then asked to negotiate with the calculator turned off. The calculator does not turn off by itself.

The coincidence with the bridge day has not gone unnoticed, and not just among patients. Four days plus the weekend make up an absence that some read as union strategy and others as simply the calendar.

The tug-of-war over minimum services and patient information

The union spokesperson speaks of a «very large indefiniteness» regarding how minimum services should be applied, which will be higher this time as two weekends fall within the strike period. His diagnosis of the precedent is devastating: in the last strike there was no information for users, and many went to the hospital to leave without being treated.

Behind the scenes, the failure is administrative plumbing. Administrators do not know if doctors will go or not, so they cannot notify anyone. The patient finds out upon arriving at the door, with the printed appointment and the shutter down.

The 80,000 euro salary and the story that does not fit

A primary care doctor in Galicia, 40 years old with fifteen years of experience, earns around 80,000 gross euros annually, according to a participant in the debate. In other specialties, with on-call shifts, the figure rises. The data bothers those who take for granted that the white coat hides a perversos salary.

With nurses, the story is debunked sooner, always according to the same participant: they do not earn 60,000 euros by a long shot, at least generally in the SERGAS (Galician Health Service). What admits less discussion is their position in the distribution: salaries in the high percentiles of their community and, nevertheless, inability to compete with capital income. That is the real axis of the complaint, and it is not always explained well.

Saturation, demographics, and the elephant in the consultation room

Here the conversation heats up. It is claimed that a single morning of specialty consultation can gather 28 patients, more than twenty of whom come from outside, some not speaking Spanish, and that this pressure pushes towards private healthcare those who can afford it. It is an argument that sounds louder and louder and requires data, not slogans.

On the other side is the structure of the system itself. Training a doctor with zero experience costs 11 years minimum; eight or nine for other specialties and three for technicians, according to the calculations discussed in the thread. With the current population pyramid, generational replacement does not happen by itself.

This is added to the framework statute and its intention, according to some participants, to force working a certain number of years in the public sector after finishing residency, with a salary lower than in the private sector. Some read this as talent retention; others, as the hand in the professional's pocket.

Facing the technological narrative —mass layoffs in software and the bet on artificial intelligence— it is remembered that medicine remains a trade of hands and ears. One participant says he uploaded a spinal MRI to an AI and compared the result with the surgeon's diagnosis. The coincidence, he says, scares as much as it reassures.

What the patient truly plays for

The four days will pass. Appointments will be rescheduled, tests will accumulate, and lists will grow a little more. What is not recovered is the time lost in a diagnosis that was already late from the factory.

How many of those 1,200 euros a doctor loses in four days will return to public healthcare converted into a longer wait?