About 570 Madrid residents received incorrect letters about colon cancer screening in February informing them of false negatives while they may have the disease and need further testing, or when they had not yet been screened. The television network reports it The sixth this Saturday, and the opposition’s reactions were not long in coming. The spokesperson of Más Madrid in the Assembly, Manuela Bergerot, calls for the resignation of the Minister of Health, Fátima Matute, and regrets having learned what happened from the press: “We are faced with an extremely serious case and what worries us most is that it is only the tip of the iceberg”.
Bergerot defines the management of the regional executive as incompetent. “The Ayuso government is trying to hide data so as not to reveal its negligent and dangerous management that no one knows anything about,” he says. He promises that his party will be able to resolve the issue to find out the whole truth, using the means at its disposal, including the judicial system. “They only care about Quirón making money and they have public health as they have it,” he complains.
The politician warns that if the Ayuso government does not provide the data, it will go to court. “The Minister of Health, Fátima Matute, must come forward as soon as possible and tell the whole truth. She must resign,” Bergerot snaps.
The PSOE’s health spokesperson in the Madrid Assembly, Carlos Moreno, is also worried about the sentence, “but even more so about the concealment of these errors”, after listening to Matute for a month “guarantee that the same thing had not happened in Madrid as in Andalusia”.
In his opinion, primary care prevention in the capital is still failing. He states that it is urgent that Madrid stops being the autonomous community with the lowest healthcare investment per inhabitant. Moreno reports that the Madrid population has an intermediate membership of the Prevecolon program, very far from that of Basque and Navarrese citizens. “We have resources blocked in the afternoon which prevent us from respecting them strident oncology and which force us to spend in other hospitals what public hospitals do not do due to lack of funding. It is unacceptable”, he denounces.
More Madrid MP Marta Carmona, a qualified psychiatrist, links the error to the “catastrophe” of breast cancer screening in Andalusia. He also links it to the “disastrous management of healthcare carried out by the PP wherever it governs because it always puts corporate profits before the health of the population”.
Más Madrid’s interim spokesperson in the capital’s City Council, Eduardo Rubiño, was one of the first to raise his voice before the start of the mass for the feast of the Virgin of Almudena. “If the Community of Madrid had nothing to hide, it would have no problem providing the information. It belongs to all the people of Madrid and not to Mrs. Ayuso,” he said before urging the Regional Executive to facilitate the communications requested by the Ministry of Health. “We are paying the consequences of that neoliberal model which is committed to dynamizing the public sector to make room for private companies,” he warned.
This is why Ayuso hides the screening data from the Ministry of Health: because he has a lot to cover.
The Community of Madrid has given negative results for colon cancer to almost 600 patients with positive tests.
The commissions that her boyfriend asks Chirón are very expensive. pic.twitter.com/QYqUHDgPbo
— Eduardo Rubiño 🏳️🌈 (@EduardoFRub) November 8, 2025
Impact on the communication of results
On February 5, the Ministry of Health of the Community of Madrid detected “an incident” in the communication of results by letter of the colon and rectal cancer screening program (Prevecolon). In a statement, Health underlines that “there was no diagnostic error in the results of the patients’ tests (for the detection of occult blood in the stool) and that “the correct results” were always recorded in the medical history.
According to the Ministry of Health, the incident occurred in the communication of the results via letter that approximately 500 patients received. It assures that from the moment the company in charge of sending the letters notified the error, on February 5, it contacted all the affected people by telephone, message or through primary care health workers.
The situation was resolved between the 5th and 12th of the same month, a week after the notification, according to the official version. “All patients who received the letter were informed of what happened,” the regional government says.
