Seville, Mar 14 (EFE).- The Government of Andalusia has defended this Tuesday the legality of all emergency health contracting carried out since the start of the pandemic and has announced that they are working on a new centralized contracting system since June – when it ends the last extension – to gain transparency.
The spokesman for the regional government, Ramón Fernández-Pacheco, has defended at a press conference after the Governing Council the legality of all emergency contracts carried out in the SAS, since they have favorable legal and intervention reports, as well as the “timely inspection” of the Chamber of Accounts.
He has argued that the objective has always been to “save lives” and that the SAS is still paying “the consequences” of covid-19.
In addition, it has guaranteed that there has been no “discretionality” in emergency hiring, whose decree has had extensions until June 2023 despite the decrease in covid-19.
The SAS is “focused on normalizing this situation” and that is why it is working, on the “June horizon”, to have a new centralized contracting system that allows “optimizing everyone’s resources”, explained the spokesperson.
Hiring according to the law
This system will centralize all Andalusian health contracting of goods and services, which until now were being done through the hospitals and centers of each province, in order to have “an economy of scale” and rush “to the last cent”.
The objective of the Board is that the emergency contracts due to covid-19 do not continue to be extended, although the spokesperson has stated that the maxim that the SAS always pursues is “to save lives”.
The Andalusian Executive has stressed on several occasions that it does not act with discretion in emergency contracts, since “all” are made “according to the law” of contracts, with the “endorsement” of the legal cabinet, “supervised” by the intervention of the Board and, those already required, by the Chamber of Accounts.
“This government does not make awards by hand, it has nothing to hide,” said Fernández-Pacheco, who has alluded to the necessary contracts in the context of the pandemic and its subsequent “consequences”.
He has insisted that “everything is made absolutely legal” and has highlighted, for example, that in 2021 emergency contracts represent 20% of surgical interventions, and in 2022 they dropped to 13.7%.
The spokesman has indicated that these are “justified emergencies at a technical level”, not political, since the counselors are not “to say what is legal or not” and “for that there is a legal cabinet and intervention.” EFE+