Óscar Álvarez López, director of the Madrid Agency for Social Care (AMAS), the body that governs the 25 public residences of the Community of Madrid, will leave office on June 30, in a resignation that the Ser network has advanced after having access to a letter from Álvarez to the Madrid Minister of Social Policies Alberto Reyero.
The resignation transcends in the middle of the political crisis in Madrid due to the alternating revelations about what happened in the region’s nursing homes during the worst phase of the pandemic, that cost thousands of seniors their lives. Among those revelations, the audio released by EL PERIÓDICO on the refusals of the Madrid health service to hospitalize the elderly. The resignation has been made public hours after the publication of this recording by this newspaper.
The reasons for resignation expressed by Álvarez in the letter are “health reasons.” In the message, Álvarez sand proudly vindicates his work “despite all the difficulties and the dramatic situation” lived with the pandemic. The letter she has addressed to her political boss is dated June 19, and announces the cessation by the end of this month.
Fifth to resign
Alvarez is the fifth position in the social health area that leaves the post in the Community of Madrid. On May 8, and for disagreeing with the presidency, the director general of Public Health resigned, Yolanda Fuentes, complaining that “political criteria” prevailed over health decisions. From the Madrid executive, the central government was insisted on the request to pass the phase, against the opinion of the health experts.
Five days later, the director general of Health and Social Coordination, the psychiatrist and former hospital manager were dismissed from his post Carlos Mur de Viu. His signature appears in the harsh protocols of the Community of Madrid that ordered to limit hospitalization only for the elderly who could walk on their own, and did not have hypertension, diabetes or hardly any cognitive impairment.
On May 20, the Governing Council dismissed the technical secretary general of the Ministry of Social Policies, Miguel Ángel Jiménez, for the award due to “human error” of a contract to the Room Mate hotel chain, in one of whose aparthotels President Díaz Ayuso was housed. And on the 23rd, Carlos Reus, Chief of Cabinet of the Councilor Alberto Reyero, presented his resignation for “personal reasons” in full disagreement between the departments of Social Policies (Cs) and Health (PP) for the management of residences.
The last resignation, 47, is a man from the University of Murcia, Catholic and very conservative. Doctor in Social Sciences and expert in public health, who worked between 1999 and 2012 in residences and had management positions in the Social Welfare area of the autonomous government since 2012. For the position he leaves, he was appointed in September 2019, ten months ago . In the Ministry of Social Policies they have insisted that he resign “strictly for health reasons”.
“It is unfair”
Hours before this resignation, the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, he had alluded to the recorded conversation between the daughter of a resident in a nursing home and the doctor who was caring for her, released by EL PERIÓDICO. For Díaz Ayuso, it is “unfair” to treat “by audios, conversations or comments” the situation experienced in the residences Madrid in March and April, during the critical weeks of the pandemic, in which health in Madrid did not allow the elderly in nursing homes to enter hospitals.
According to Efe reports, when asked about the recording of the phone call on the morning of this Friday, Ayuso said that no conclusions can be drawn from “conversations, opinions, ‘because I wanted to’, ‘because I believe’, ‘because I said’ … On such tragic nights where up to 500 people died in Madrid “.
The Madrid president appeared after a meeting in the San Martín de Valdeiglesias Fire Station, in the extreme west of the region, with the presidents of Castilla-La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page, and Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco.
When the press asked him about the news reported by this newspaper, Díaz Ayuso has not denied the situation or the context in which that conversation took place, on March 23, between Ramona Carvajal from Madrid and the doctor who was monitoring the state. from his mother, Alejina Jiménez, admitted and ill at the Vitalia de Griñón residence. The 89-year-old woman, sick with coronavirus but conscious, “does not have the criteria to refer her,” the doctor told her. Alejina took 17 more days to die.
Díaz Ayuso has stated that, although the Community of Madrid would have had “an extraordinary reinforcement of doctors”, the pandemic would have been very difficult to stop, because, he argued, “when COVID enters the body of an older person, it warns late” and “Elderly people who have been treated in the hospital with the best means have been seen who have died in a few hours.”
“You have to take into account that we have lived a war in this country “, he has excused himself Díaz Ayuso, due to a “devastating” pandemic that entered Madrid as “a tsunami”. For him, it is unfair to “extract conversations and comments from so many nights of pain”, in which the region’s health or firefighters “gave their best” without having information about what the coronavirus was.
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