spanish health care

Hi, My Wife and I have registered with the INSS at Fuengirola and have recieved an A4 sheet of paper telling us we are registered for health care.

I understood that we would each recieve a medical card which we would need to take to our local GP in La Cala to register with him/her.

May I ask from whom we obtain medical cards, do we need to make an appointment with the gp and should we take an interpretor with us. Thanks.

My questions are

Did you register with your S1 forms received from Newcastle?

If so, you should be on the system. In this area, a temporary healthcard is issued and I assume that the paper you have is one of those. It can take up to 3 months for the permanent card to come through. The permanent card also has the name of the doctor you are registered with on the back.

Regarding interpreters. Whilst many reception staff speak English, we generally found the doctors wouldn't so an interpreter was required. I think many of the doctors are a bit wary of giving wrong information due to language errors. My husband speaks Spanish and comes with me to interpret. Now that we have been here for some years, the GP does now speak to me in English. Quite funny sometimes as she explains things in Spanish to my husband and then tells me the same thing in English.

Hi Mariedav, Thanks for that. Yes we registered with our S1 forms. The papers we have recieved confirms we have been granted spanish health care so presumably we can produce those should we need medical care prior to recieving our health cards.

Interesting to note that we are assigned a gp. I understood that we needed to go to our local health clinic to register.

Perhaps the spanish are becoming better organised!!!!!!

As I said, we actually had a temporary health card which was a credit sized piece of cardboard until the plastic cards came through. We were automatically registered at the nearest medical centre so there was no need to go in person to register. 

Of course, the system may be different in your area so you might wish to ask one of your neighbours to confirm this.