Laurence Dollimore
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A UTERINE cancer patient has blasted the Hospital Costa del Sol for having to wait more than 120 days for urgent surgery.
Known only as Daniela A, the 46-year-old woman has revealed she has been waiting for the potentially life-saving operation since October last year.
But despite being classed as a ‘priority’, she claims she has yet to be contacted by the hospital to confirm her surgery, and has now filed an official denuncia at the Malaga Prosecutor’s Office.
Speaking to La Opinion de Malaga, Daniela said: “It is a terrible anguish… I am suffering incredible pain, which means there are times when I cannot even get up due to fatigue and discomfort. I am also suffering from incontinence.”
READ MORE: Crisis declared at Hospital Costa del Sol
She has allegedly become so stressed over the ordeal that she has been forced to go to the ER on at least two occasions.
Daniela is the mother of two teenagers, aged 14 and 17, and says she is “scared” after losing her own father to cancer.
She added: “If I am supposedly a priority, I don’t know what we are waiting for, when the doctors told me the problem is getting worse with each passing day and that we must intervene as soon as possible.”
Daniela had her first operation in September last year however it was not enough to remove the cancer. On October 25 a request for a second intervention was filed but a date has yet to be confirmed.
It comes after a doctor’s union last month denounced what it described as a ‘profound crisis’ at the Hospital Universitario Costa del Sol, due to underfunding and huge waiting lists.
The Malaga Medical Union (SMM) claimed that at the end of 2023, there were ‘75,368 patients waiting for surgery, a diagnostic test or a consultation’.
That number accounts for 22% of the population in the area who depend on the healthcare system, according to the union delegate in the hospital, Jose Luis Prada.
Prada blamed underfunding for the regional health system, given that the official figures for the registered population were grossly out of line with reality.
He also pointed to the ‘enormous overload’ of emergency rooms, partly due to the then spike in respiratory infections currently being registered across Spain in the wake of the Christmas holidays.
“Essentially, this is a problem related to historical underfunding of this hospital, which has got worse due to the bad management […] during the hospital’s change in management model,” he said, in quotes cited by Malaga Hoy.
