SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 24 Oct. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Special Deputy for Equality between Women and Men and Gender Violence of the Common Council, Beatriz Barrera, has agreed this Monday with a representation of almost 70 doctors from the Canary Islands Health Service (SCS) to request a report from the Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands to clarify whether the practice of not renewing or interrupting contracts in the event of pregnancy persists.
Barrera is also going to meet with public officials from the Ministry of Health to mediate, get both parties to sit down and try to resolve this problem that affects dozens of doctors and specialists in the Canary Islands area.
The objective, according to a statement from the Confluence Table of Doctors and Physicians of the Canary Islands, is to know if there are general instructions that take into account that a maternity leave is a transitory temporary disability or maternity leave and that this cannot condition a renewal contractual.
In addition, she was also surprised at these issues, regretting that they still occur while talking about family reconciliation and when legislating at the national level and in the autonomous communities to make it easier for women who decide to become mothers.
“What we cannot do is adopt practices that discourage motherhood,” she added.
The representatives of these affected workers –Dácil García for the University Hospital of the Canary Islands and Purificación Ramírez on behalf of the Nuestra Señora de Candelaria University Hospital– presented their complaints to Barrera and were summoned for another upcoming meeting where they will send all the documentation which shows that those affected by the suspension of the contract suffer a “double damage”.
On the one hand, they point out, the moral damage inflicted by their non-renewal while pregnant and, on the other, the non-computation of the time without a contract during their pregnancy for the purposes of the scale in the extraordinary processes of consolidation of the workforce.
They have also explained that they have evidence of this way of acting by the SCS, even though there is an instruction in force that protects them since 2018.
In this way, they indicate, “there is no doubt that the indicated instruction and intention that they articulate, have not been, are not, and consequently will not be sufficient to eradicate this scourge of gender discrimination, still installed today within of the Canary Health Service”.
