The Minister of Health, Mónica García, has been publicly denouncing for days that the PP autonomies have refused to give her data from the last five years of population screening for breast cancer. He has accused them of endangering “women’s health” and of wanting to hide them “because they are bad.” García demanded them by letter a few days ago, and wanted them to be presented to him today at the Plenary Session of the Interterritorial Council of the National Health System (Cisns).
Far from refusing for the reasons alluded to by the minister, the popular health advisors already explained in a response letter last Monday that their request was “inadmissible” because “the Ministry itself has not completed the development of the computer system necessary for collecting and uploading the requested data.”
In addition, they added that the consensus document of the information system of the population cancer screening program of the National Health System (SNS), approved at the Cisns Screening Presentation last April, “is in the process of review due to technical difficulties expressed by several autonomous communities.”
The minister turned a deaf ear to the arguments, going so far as to hold the president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, directly responsible for the fact that the autonomies governed by his party did not want to provide the data. The accusation was answered yesterday by Feijóo who, from Brussels, addressed García to tell him that he was surprised that his ministry requested this information “without complying with the commitments of the protocol and the computer system.”
According to the leader of the PP, for months they had been working on a protocol between all the health services of the autonomous communities to organize the content and dump that data into a computer program, but “neither the protocol is done, nor the dump, the computer application, is done.”
As LA RAZÓN announced, the current situation is that, although the autonomous and Health technicians have been working since 2021 on the development of an information system to be able to evaluate cancer screening programs in a unified way throughout the national territory, it is not yet operational. And the responsibility lies with the ministry, which has not completed the last stage of the process.
“In 2021, the general directors of Public Health met in the Public Health Commission and unanimously approved the development of an information system to be able to evaluate cancer screening programs,” Elena Andradas, general director of Public Health of the Community of Madrid, explains to LA RAZÓN. In 2023, once the pandemic ended, the technicians of the autonomies, coordinated by Health, began to develop the indicators to be able to evaluate the cancer screening programs, the quality requirements, among others, but the “functional” part, that is, “the criteria that the information system must meet so that from the autonomies we send information that is homogeneous and comparable and its implementation, are pending,” Andradas details.
“The evaluation indicators for cancer screening programs are agreed upon, but the last stage has not been completed, nor has funding been put on the table to develop it,” he adds.
And it is Health that has the responsibility of coordinating and aggregating the data, that is, harmonizing the indicators agreed upon in the SNS so that the data are comparable, as it does, for example, with the information on waiting lists.
Change of indicators
The Minister of Health of Castilla y León, Alejandro Vázquez, also spoke along these lines yesterday, recalling that, in April 2025, in the screening presentation, “a document was prepared that talked about a series of indicators and a computer system that the ministry had to make available to the communities to be able to upload the data.” Vázquez explained that, in addition, the data “were going to be collected from the beginning of the approval of the document, in 2025, and would be uploaded between January and March of the year following the expired year.” However, as the counselor stated, “the Ministry of Health, once again making political use of the Interterritorial Council, has decided, without consulting the communities, to modify the indicators that were in the presentation.”
Even so, the Minister of Economy and Finance and spokesperson for the Board, Carlos Fernández, assured that the region will send them “in the terms agreed upon in the screening presentation, in accordance with the shared criteria.”