ADVANCE 2: SPECIALIST CONSULTATIONS. PUBLIC DEPENDENCY

Description

National report on public specialty consultations 2010-2020

This document analyzes in detail the evolution of public specialist consultations between 2010 and 2020 , a period in which a decreasing trend in the weight of public health on the total activity in specialist consultations in Spain is detected.

Although the absolute volume increased slightly each year, the proportion corresponding to the public healthcare system gradually decreased. In 2010, they represented more than 78% of the total, and by 2019, barely 70%. This structural decline was exacerbated by the impact of the pandemic, which resulted in the loss of more than 10 million scheduled appointments in 2020 alone.

In addition to the number of missed appointments, the report highlights the bottleneck created in specialist care, with a clear overload in the capacity to resolve initial consultations and an increase in referrals from primary care . All of this has created a more strained system, where full recovery seems unfeasible with current resources.

The document also analyzes the differences between initial and follow-up appointments, the correlation with waiting lists, and the structural difficulty in absorbing increased demand in the public system. Restoring the pre-pandemic situation in 2021 would have required an extraordinary volume of healthcare activity that has not been achieved.

This report is essential to understanding the challenges of healthcare capacity in Spain and to guiding decisions in health policy.

This content corresponds to the official report "National Level. Public Dependency. Progress 2", dated February 2023.