The government of Benidorm urges the Consell to declare the expansion of the hospital and the new Rincón health center "strategic"

Benidorm government team is going to raise a motion to the next plenary session to urge the Regional Goverment to declare "strategic" the expansion of La Vila Joiosa regional hospital and the construction of the new health center in Rincón de Loix. The motion comes after the health emergency plan announced by the president of the Generalitat, Ximo Puig, which includes streamlining procedures and speeding up the work deadlines for actions that are considered ‘strategic’.

To date, as the mayor, Toni Pérez, has pointed out, the Generalitat “has not yet defined which are these 'strategic' health infrastructures both to face the current pandemic and to prepare the best care for citizens in the phase post Covid-19 ".

Hence, the local government suggests the need to obtain "two infrastructures that affect us directly, such as, in Benidorm, the construction of the new Rincón de Loix health center, and at the regional level the expansion of Marina Baixa hospital". Two infrastructures that "are included in the 2021 Generalitat Budgets, with an endowment of 800,000 and 7 million euros respectively".

At this point, the mayor recalled that "both infrastructures that are so necessary and so demanded have been on the Consell's health agenda for several years, without any of them having been materialized to date despite their repeated appearance in successive Budgets of the Generalitat ”. "If these infrastructures were already necessary before the pandemic, during it they have been revealed even more urgent and cannot be postponed," he pointed out.

Toni Pérez added that "we understand that both works should be considered 'strategic', since their execution would allow adequate attention to all those pathologies that unfortunately during the pandemic have suffered delays in their care." Thus, he is convinced that addressing both will make it possible to "regain normalcy as soon as possible."

In relation to Rincón de Loix health center, the mayor has reported that the City Council gave to the Ministry of Health in 2017 the land for the new facilities, a 3,558-square-meter plot on Zamora street next to Antonio López football fields. This assignment was formalized a year later, when the regional government accepted this assignment; and since 2019 there is a project for the new health center. However, if the provisions of the Generalitat's Budget for 2021 are fulfilled, the new facilities will not be completed until 2023, “a period that seems excessive and that we consider it necessary to advance in order to ensure that the entire population of Benidorm has access to health care in the best conditions ”.