The head of healthcare in the Spanish region of Andalucía has resigned and the local government has been forced to present an emergency plan after it emerged that hundreds of women with suspect mammography results had not been diagnosed or contacted for further testing.
“The situation is serious and I have taken drastic decisions,” said Juanma Moreno, the conservative president of the southern region, on Thursday. The previous day, he had accepted the resignation of healthcare head Rocío Hernández and acknowledged that her department had mismanaged the crisis.
About 2,000 women are believed to have undergone screening but were not contacted for further testing despite showing signs suggesting they might require more checks or treatment.
Some underwent testing as long as two years ago. The regional government has said that about 90 per cent of the cases were linked to the Virgen del Rocío hospital in Seville, with the rest in Málaga and Jerez de la Frontera.
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Mr Moreno has announced an emergency plan aimed at addressing the situation, which would involve bolstering hospital radiology units to ensure that women affected are informed of their results and tested again by the end of November.
“In the next seven or eight weeks, all the women will be tested,” said Carolina España, spokeswoman for the local government, which has said that the issue came to light only in “the last few days”.
However, representatives of the women affected say that the problems were uncovered long before that and that the local government was slow to act.
According to Cadena Ser, a radio station that has investigated, the first complaints were made in early 2024, when several women said they had not been given feedback about tests.
In the summer of last year, the president of Amama, an association representing women suffering breast cancer, informed the then head of healthcare of concerns about delays in diagnoses.
When more complaints were aired at the end of September this year, the Andalucía government said that there were just three cases of women in this situation.
The following day, it admitted that the real number was about 2,000.
“The Andalucía Healthcare Service knew of problems with screening diagnoses, but they didn’t do anything about it for a year-and-a-half, when they pull out of their sleeve an emergency plan which is insufficient because women are going to have to wait up to two months to be tested,” said Manuel Jiménez, lawyer for Amama, which is bringing legal against the regional healthcare service.
Labour unions have questioned the local government’s ability to recruit more radiologists as part of its plan, citing the existing shortfall in this area. Andalucía has 7.2 radiologists for every 100,000 inhabitants, the lowest of the country’s 17 regions, which have a national average of 9.15 per 100,000.
