CCOO union denounces poor condition of Sagunto Hospital, demands urgent investment
The CCOO health workers' union has denounced the deteriorating condition of facilities and equipment at Sagunto Hospital, and is demanding immediate investment from the regional health department, which serves 51 towns in the area.
The Health and Social-Health Sectors Federation of CCOO PV (a major Spanish trade union) in the Camp de Morvedre-Alt Palància area has denounced the poor condition of several facilities and pieces of equipment at Sagunto Hospital. The union is calling on the Conselleria de Sanidad (the Valencian regional health department) to make an immediate investment to fix the problems found at the centre, which treats patients from across the district.
Sagunto Hospital has been running since January 1982, meaning the building has been in continuous use for more than 44 years. It is a well-established facility that, after several decades, requires constant maintenance of roofs, installations and equipment to keep up the quality of care.
According to union sources, the deterioration affects several parts of the hospital, although the complaint does not publicly specify which areas are the most damaged. The claim comes in a year when Sagunto Hospital has already made headlines over the opening of a new 9,500-square-metre outpatient building, a project that has coincided with controversy over patients being redirected to private clinics due to a lack of appointments at the hospital itself.
The size of the hospital's coverage area partly explains the constant pressure on its facilities: it provides healthcare to 51 municipalities across three districts, a population far larger than that of Sagunto alone. Of those, 16 belong to Camp de Morvedre, 27 to l'Alt Palància, and the rest to l'Horta Nord. For CCOO, any deterioration of infrastructure or equipment has a direct impact on both healthcare staff and the patients who travel to the hospital from these towns every day.
The hospital has 252 beds, a figure that gives a sense of the centre's scale for a town the size of Sagunto and helps explain why the upkeep of facilities and equipment is so sensitive: any fault potentially affects a considerable number of admitted patients in a building that, as the union itself points out, has been in continuous use for more than four decades.
The hospital also has a little-known architectural distinction: it was the first public hospital in Spain designed on horizontal-layout principles, following the Nucleus system developed by Britain's National Health Service (NHS). This was a typical model for 1980s hospital architecture, spreading services across low, sprawling wings rather than concentrating them in a single tall building.
The complaint also comes against a broader backdrop of demographic growth in Camp de Morvedre: the district has seen new residents and workers arrive in recent years linked to its industrial transformation, which is shifting from traditional steelmaking toward green energy and electric mobility, with projects such as the PowerCo battery gigafactory and Toyota Sagunt's logistics operations. That growth adds, in the medium term, extra pressure on public services such as healthcare, which already serve a population spread across 51 municipalities. CCOO, for its part, is a regular voice in the district's social campaigns, with a recurring presence in debates over housing, working conditions and public healthcare — areas in which the union has spent years calling for greater investment. The district has for decades combined established heavy industry — such as the ArcelorMittal Sagunto steelworks and the Saggas liquefied-natural-gas regasification plant — with the more recent arrival of new technology sectors, a diverse economic base that also translates into a large workforce spread across the 51 municipalities the hospital serves, which is why any debate over healthcare investment in the area tends to look beyond the municipal boundaries of Sagunto itself.
The union is demanding that the regional health department act as soon as possible to stop the damage from getting worse and putting the quality of care at risk. So far, the regional administration has not publicly responded to the CCOO complaint.
According to elperiodic.com, with additional background from Wikipedia on the history and features of Sagunto Hospital.