Costa del Sol hospital to finally stop charging patients for watching television

Albeit with a delay of almost a year and a half compared with hospitals in Malaga city, the Axarquía hospital in Torre del Mar on the eastern Costa del Sol has also confirmed that it is to stop charging patients to watch television. The Malaga East-Axarquía health management area made the announcement via its social media saying that from Tuesday 4 March patients at the Axarquía hospital will no longer have to pay to watch television during their stay.

This measure was an electoral promise made by the president of the Andalusian regional government, Juanma Moreno, on the first day of the 2022 election campaign. Moreno pledged to bring free wifi to all Andalusian public hospitals as well as a free television service.

Moreno then claimed that a contract signed by the previous socialist PSOE administration of the Junta de Andalucía was in force which obliged patients to pay for television in public hospitals. Moreno promised that as soon as the contract expired, the Andalusian health service (SAS) would take over the service.

Each hospital had its own contract which meant that end dates varied and the measure has not been without controversy. When Moreno announced as an electoral promise in 2022 that he would stop charging for the use of televisions, the opposition reminded him that this had been attempted in 2018, but that in 2019 the Partido Popular (PP) and Ciudadanos executive (with the support of Vox) paralysed it.

In a press statement sent out on 31 July 2018, the then PSOE government reported that the spokesperson for health at the time, Marina Álvarez, had announced that all public hospitals in Andalucía would in the future offer free television service for patients. "Its implementation, which has already begun in 19 of them, will be carried out gradually until it is extended to the entire Andalusian public health system network in the first half of 2019," she said at the time.

The press statement pointed out that the 19 hospitals in which the service was in operation were: La Inmaculada, Poniente (first phase) and El Toyo, in Almeria; Hospital de La Línea de la Concepción (Cadiz); Montilla, Valle del Guadiato and Puente Genil (Cordoba); Loja and Guadix (Granada); Riotinto (Huelva); Alto Guadalquivir, Sierra de Segura, Alcaudete and Alcalá la Real (Jaén), and Lebrija, Utrera, Écija, Sierra Norte and Morón (Seville); none of them in Malaga.

It reported that eight other centres would be incorporated in September of that year: Torrecárdenas (Almeria), Jerez de la Frontera (Cadiz), Baza (Granada) and Juan Ramón Jiménez and Infanta Elena (Huelva), as well as the Jaén Hospital Complex and the San Juan de la Cruz hospital in Úbeda and San Agustín in Linares; again, none in Malaga.

"The forecast will be completed during the first half of 2019 with the rest of the hospitals: Poniente de Almeria (second phase); Puerta del Mar, Puerto Real and Punta de Europa (Cadiz); Reina Sofía, Infanta Margarita in Cabra and Valle de los Pedroches in Pozoblanco (Cordoba); Virgen de las Nieves and San Cecilio in Granada city and Santa Ana in Motril (Granada); Antequera, Axarquía, Serranía de Ronda, Costa del Sol and Benalmádena, in the province of Malaga, as well as the Regional and Virgen de la Victoria in the city, Virgen del Rocío, Virgen Macarena, Valme and La Merced de Osuna, in Seville," it said.

However, after the change of government in 2019, this non-renewal of contracts ceased to occur until October 2023, when television was finally free in the centres in Malaga city. Now this free service has also been extended to the Axarquía hospital.