Andalucia’s health minister has resigned in the wake of the breast cancer testing crisis that threatens to engulf the Junta.
President of the region, Juanma Moreno, confirmed on Thursday that he had accepted the resignation of Rocio Hernandez.
It follows the revelation that the SAS (Andalucia health service) failed to tell potentially thousands of women that they needed to return for further tests following mammograms or consultations.
Moreno described Hernandez’s resignation as ‘an unusual act of responsibility’ in Spain, where he claimed ‘no one resigns.’
However, critics accused him of making Hernandez the scapegoat and hoping her quitting would make the scandal ‘go away’.
Speaking before the Andalucian Parliament, Moreno said the government acted quickly to trace the source of the problem, which was largely isolated to a single unit at Hospital Virgen del Rocio in Sevilla, a key reference hospital in the region.
‘Over 90% of the errors were concentrated in one area of the hospital,’ he explained. ‘This was a localised failure, not a system-wide collapse.’
In response, the Junta launched a 12 million euro emergency plan to review and tighten breast cancer screening protocols, recruit new radiologists and radiology assistants and complete all delayed screenings for affected women by November 30.
Moreno insisted the government has taken responsibility from the outset and revealed plans to restructure internal operations within the Health Ministry, acknowledging gaps in the internal flow of critical information that prevented top officials from detecting the scale of the issue sooner.
‘Important information doesn’t always reach the top levels of government as fast as it should,’ he admitted, adding that around 2,000 women may have been affected, a number far beyond the expected margin of error in a public health system.
To address these failures, some officials involved in the breakdown of communication will be removed from their posts, and internal communication protocols will be updated to prevent similar delays in the future.
Read more Andalucia news at the Spanish Eye.
