The mayor of La Laguna, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, yesterday presented the City’s Gold Medal to the Canary University Hospital (HUC) in recognition of the work carried out during its 50-year history. The Teatro Leal was the setting chosen to celebrate the act of recognition of the hospital center, in which the local councilor awarded the highest distinction of the municipality to the health personnel of this third-level complex. Among the people who attended the institutional event were the Minister of the Presidency of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Berta Pérez; the regional senator Santiago Pérez; the manager of the HUC, Mercedes Cueto, who was in charge of collecting the award on behalf of the staff; the president of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, Gustavo Matos; the deputy of the regional Chamber Nira Fierro, and the subdelegate of the Government in the Tenerife province, Javier Plata.
During his speech, the mayor thanked and congratulated the HUC “for its good work during all these years”, with a “exemplary trajectory, in continuous progression towards excellence”, which places it as “one of the reference hospitals in the whole of the country ”thanks to the“ sense of responsibility of our health workers ”. A team that “has shown its commitment and its worth and that has made an exceptional measure in this pandemic,” Gutiérrez stressed.
The mayor valued “the successes achieved” and the “priceless” work carried out in this complex since its opening in 1971, currently reaching 800 beds and exceeding more than 5,600 workers, to serve the northern population from Tenerife and from La Palma, the island to which he sent a message of solidarity.
Minister Berta Pérez assured that the HUC has become “a symbol, an emblem of Tenerife’s commitment to public health, as well as an example of the importance of continuing to bet and invest in innovation and cutting-edge technologies.”
The regional senator Santiago Pérez also added himself to the congratulations for these five decades of history, highlighting “the high human and professional level of the entire team at this center, which is the pride of Tenerife and the Canary Islands.”
“I want to once again recognize the tireless work of all the professionals who carry out their work here, and having fought and continue to fight this pandemic on the front line,” said Berta Pérez, while showing her gratitude “to all HUC personnel ”.
Mercedes Cueto, managing director of the center, thanked the City Council of La Laguna “for the commitment to the HUC all this time and to give us this recognition that it is an honor to collect on behalf of all the workers of the University Hospital. Of course, they will not all be able to be there due to capacity restrictions, but we have tried to have a representation of the workers who made the start of this hospital possible, workers who have maintained it throughout these years at a level of excellence that has been , and workers of the next generations and who will be the future of the hospital ”.
“I believe that a characteristic of the HUC has always been the commitment to the population to be innovative and at the forefront in the health services we provide, with the teaching vocation it has had and the commitments with the University of La Laguna, and also the character of research hospital. Those are the characteristics that the HUC has maintained throughout all these years. We have numerous examples with such important milestones throughout history such as being the first hospital in the Canary Islands to have a coronary heart unit, the first to do a real transplant and a pancreatic reno transplant, we have also been the first hospital to do an intervention of Extracorporeal heart surgery, we had the first linear accelerator in the Canary Islands in 1992, the first living donor kidney transplant, etc. I think this is a HUC brand ”, he concluded.
