The Ministry of Health and the autonomous communities have reached an agreement to share basic data on cancer screening (breast, colorectal and cervical), so that they can be comparable. They will be based on three fundamental indicators: how much of the population was invited for screening, what part of it participated in the tests and what final percentage tested positive.
Public health directors will outline the basic indicators this Thursday. They will serve as a reference before the creation of a larger database, according to the agreement reached by councilors and the minister this Wednesday at the Interterritorial Council of the National Health System (CISNS).
The minister, Mónica García, had urged communities to share data after the screening scandal that broke out in Andalusia. The problem, the People’s Party leaders argued, was that there was no IT platform to do it, therefore there was no official and homogeneous way to do it.
Despite this, all communities, except Madrid, have committed to sending the data in their possession to Health. Last week, the Ministry threatened the community to sue if it did not receive them within a month.
But this Wednesday things calmed down. Although the CISNS was “tense,” in García’s words, an agreement was eventually reached. The councilor of the Community of Madrid, Fátima Matute, also celebrated that the basic indicators will allow statistics to be shared and compared between communities in a homogeneous way. “We got the minister to commit not to use screening as a political weapon,” he said as he left the CISNS.
Both agreed that the screening situation is generating “citizen distrust” in tests that save lives. But if the Madrid councilor attributed the blame to the “media circus” that was created around it, the Minister of Health highlighted the autonomous popular governments and, without explicitly naming it, that of Madrid, the only one that had refused to provide the available indicators.
“After weeks of incomprehensible blockade, the PP communities agreed to hand over the data,” he said. “Today we reiterated the need for there to be trust and transparency, for citizens to once again have confidence in the screening systems, which we are sure work in all autonomous communities, the first thing that must be there is transparency, that councilors have nothing to hide and give us the data normally”, he added.
After a meeting that lasted more than five hours at the ministry’s headquarters, García took stock of the situation since, at the beginning of October, “the alarm went off” in Andalusia when the AMAMA association reported that more than 2,000 women (today it is estimated that there are more than 4,000) had undergone a dubious test and had not been informed.
On October 13th, the Ministry of Health sent a letter to the communities asking them to send the screening data and on the 24th, in an ordinary CISNS, the popular councilors withdrew due to disagreement with the Ministry on sending them.
(Breaking news, there will be an extension)
