The UN recognizes the role of cooperatives in the Spanish healthcare

«The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a sudden and massive increase in demand for health services, and health cooperatives in many countries were ready to provide support, relieving some of the pressures being faced by public health-care systems», says the Secretary General of the United Nations in his report Cooperatives in social development.

The document mentions examples such as Brazil, where «the effects of the pandemic have been devastating», and Japan, where «health cooperatives provided free medical care for vulnerable populations». It also highlights the case of Spain, where health cooperatives such as ASISA and Assistència Sanitària «opened their facilities for use by the public sector». The report also states that many cooperatives distributed personal protective equipment, carried out awareness campaigns and established support funds for health workers affected by the disease, and it mentions the good practices developed in India and Cameroon.

In its conclusions, the United Nations report calls on governments to «create policies and programmes to leverage the cooperative enterprise model for a more inclusive and resilient recovery by scaling up the provision of cooperative health-care services to cover a larger number of people».

The report can be consulted at the this link.