Madrid pushes back in Ramón y Cajal waiting-list row

Here is what the Spanish press is reporting today, outlet by outlet. According to El País, internal documents (emails plus testimony from four doctors) show that between 28 February and 14 March 2025, the surgical priority of 57 patients in the Orthopaedic Surgery and Traumatology department of Madrid's Ramón y Cajal hospital was lowered without consulting the surgeons handling their cases. One internal message quoted by the paper instructed staff to "avoid as far as possible" flagging these patients as priority cases, while still booking them an approximate operation date and requesting the pre-operative study as urgent. El Plural, drawing on the same documents, names the medical director Rafael Martínez Fernández and the head of Traumatology Basilio José de la Torre Escuredo as the people behind the instructions, and reports that the aim was to meet productivity targets set by Madrid's regional health department.

The regional government's response is what pushed the story to the top of Spain's news feeds today. According to eldiario.es, the regional health chief Fátima Matute turned the accusation around, claiming the whistleblowing surgeon had himself "irregularly manipulated" the severity of patients "to work less and operate on less complex cases." The same outlet adds that Matute went after national Health Minister Mónica García, accusing her of extending "one particular professional's behaviour" to every Madrid hospital, and dismissed the complaints as the "bulo del día" (rumour of the day). Telemadrid reports that regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso used the exact same phrase, framing the whole affair as a hoax aimed at Madrid.

The political fight quickly moved to the wider question of waiting lists. On LaSexta's programme Al Rojo Vivo, PSOE deputy Juan Lobato argued that official waiting lists have ballooned under Ayuso, from 623,000 people when she took the presidency to 950,000 today. Mundiario adds a second Socialist voice: Óscar López, presented as the PSOE-M candidate for the Madrid presidency, called the case a "scandal" and demanded explanations from Ayuso directly. On the administrative side, eldiario.es notes that the health department has opened preliminary inquiries to gather information on the cases, but has limited that investigation to Ramón y Cajal alone.

A few things remain open, and we are not resolving them for you. The name of the whistleblowing surgeon does not appear in any of the sources consulted. The headline figures also diverge: some outlets put the total number of entries on Madrid's lists near 946,000 across surgery, first consultations and diagnostic tests, while Lobato's 623,000-to-950,000 comparison could not be cross-checked directly, as the original El País and Cadena SER pieces were not reachable. That is why several facts here reach you through El Plural, eldiario.es and other outlets citing the original reporting, rather than from those source articles read in full.

Sources : El País, El Plural, eldiario.es, Telemadrid, LaSexta, Mundiario, Google Trends.