The Community of Madrid announced this Tuesday an investigation after EL PAÍS revealed the case of allegedly irregular changes in the waiting list at Ramón y Cajal Hospital. The news was given by the Health Minister, Fátima Matute, during an event this afternoon in which President Isabel Díaz Ayuso received the politician of the year award presented by a health magazine. “Since we learned about this news, we have opened internal information proceedings to review our entire system again,” Matute told the journalists present, at the end of a day in which criticism from the health sector and the entire opposition intensified over what happened at the hospital, one of the largest in Madrid’s healthcare system.
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Sources from the Ministry specify that the investigation will be limited exclusively to Ramón y Cajal and that all parties will be summoned to give their version.
However, the minister anticipated the result: “I want to make it clear that in the Community of Madrid waiting lists are not falsified” and also questioned the credibility of the whistleblower who provided the documentation to this newspaper, surgeon Luis Alberto Martos: “The truth is that the vile attack on the excellence of Madrid’s healthcare, which is certainly the treasure I have to defend, is sad.”
President Ayuso did not comment during her brief speech when receiving the award from the magazine ConSalud, which adds to other previous recognitions from the private health sector. Ayuso highlighted that “Madrid’s public system is first-class.”
It was her minister who took charge of defending the Community’s position on this matter, combining that investigation with questioning Martos. “I must say that it is false that the lists are being manipulated, which is a mantra that is being tried to be made to seem true and which is certainly based on the statements of a healthcare worker who has a disciplinary file open long before making these statements in a media outlet,” she said.
Martos is the 62-year-old doctor from the Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology service who provided this newspaper with dozens of pages of internal information proving the alteration, by order of two officials: the head of the service, Basilio de la Torre, and the medical director, Rafael Martínez. Additionally, EL PAÍS cross-checked his version with three other colleagues from his service.
The events occurred between February 28 and March 14, 2025, when the priority of 57 patients waiting for surgery was altered. It was lowered from urgent (which implies the hospital must operate on them within less than 90 days) to normal (deadline of 180 days). In this way, according to an email, time was gained to meet the productivity target imposed by the Ministry of Health, at the cost of those patients waiting twice as long.
Martos had not hidden from EL PAÍS that last spring the manager initiated an internal conflict and harassment file, at the request of the two officials mentioned. According to the evidence shown, that procedure was opened after he internally reported those two chiefs.
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