An afternoon pediatrician, a permanent emergency service at night and on weekends, more days to carry out tests, and more doctors who can attend to the population, were some of the claims made yesterday by the residents of Saint Andrew during the demonstration called to demand decent healthcare and, specifically, improvements to the neighborhood clinic, which has both material and human deficiencies.
The protest, which was attended by more than 300 people, according to the organizers, started at 11:00 a.m. from the church, went through Avelino Delgado street, continued along Dique avenue in the direction of the Taganana highway and ended at the decentralized offices of the City hall. At that point, the president of the El Pescador neighborhood association, Gabriel Rodríguez, read a manifesto in which he stressed that health “is the greatest and most precious asset for human beings” and therefore, it was essential to have a health system “that responds to the needs” of the neighbors and “allows them to live in peace, aware that they can count on efficient material and professional means”.
He recalled that in the 1990s, the demands of the population focused on the construction of a socio-health center that, in addition to the inhabitants of San Andrés, later had to attend to those of other population centers in Anaga, such as San José de Suculum and Igueste. “This requires an office that has minimum requirements both materially and humanly, with health workers willing to serve us professionally, with empathy towards patients, with always cordial treatment that respects the patient and their problems the background of these behaviors”, since there are many complaints about the “little empathy of the staff”, said Rodríguez.
poor performance
On the contrary, he added, “for years we have been receiving complaints from neighbors that focus on the poor functioning of the clinic, in the broadest sense of the word. These deficiencies have increased during the pandemic and currently continue.
Far from looking the other way, the neighborhood association has addressed different letters to those responsible for the area without success, since both parties have met on several occasions but later there are no solutions.
Gabriel Rodríguez reminded the demonstrators of some of the most serious problems that the office currently has and that have worsened over the last two years. One of them is to have only one doctor per shift. This means that if you have to attend house calls, patients have to wait for you to return. “It can take hours for this to happen. It is neither ethical nor fair that patients have to wait for the only doctor to arrive to be treated. We demand another doctor so that they do not have to be affected by this situation, ”he snapped.
The pediatric service is also deficient, as there is only one pediatrician in the morning, so they require another to attend in the afternoons.
Regarding emergencies, the neighborhood representative said that they are not provided at night or on weekends, occasions that, if needed, have to be referred to the La Casa del Mar health center, on Avenida de Anaga. This was the case during the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, when the neighbors had to move to that point, “despite the fact that there were people who did not have the resources to take a bus and it would have been easier to put a nurse in San Andrés” , considered the president of ‘El Pescador’.
In relation to the material means, those affected ask that the space of the building be better used, something essential to guarantee better attention. “The property has become small. There are areas of it that are clearly wasted. The area for analytics is only used a few days a week and remains closed the rest of the days”, he asserted.
This is not the first time they have made these claims. They have already been transferred on several occasions to the Administration “without any of them having been answered positively to date,” he said.
Indignation
For this reason, “after carrying out a collection of signatures supported by more than 600 neighbors and the municipal plenary itself urging the competent administration to correct errors, we see with indignation how the circumstances allow us to understand that the health center of the The people demand an urgent and immediate response that contributes to its improvement in all aspects,” he said.
At the end of the act, the president clarified that those responsible for the association “do not like to call demonstrations, but when the neighbors complain about the same thing, the last recourse that we had left after having presented signatures, writings and having had meetings with the zone manager after which there were no answers, was to protest in the street”.
Rodríguez considered that “the support of the population was satisfactory because not only residents of San Andrés attended but also of María Jiménez, El Suculum, Igueste and Cueva Bermeja and that it was a weekend.”
Thus, with banners that read: ‘For decent healthcare’ and flags of the Canary Islands, the protesters marched for more than an hour to demand solutions to a series of problems that have been going on for years. “It is simply that the Canary Islands Government Health Department” shows its willingness to find them.
In this sense, Gabriel Rodríguez announced that on Friday they received a call from the Primary Care manager to summon them to a new meeting next week with this last objective.
