SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 1 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands has issued a statement this Wednesday in which it specifies that the unusable material for sanitary use reaches 1.9 million masks that hospitals received through donations from companies, Ingesa and, in to a lesser extent, from direct purchases, which represents four percent of the more than 43 million masks used during the pandemic by SCS professionals.
Also remember that the warehouses of the hospital centers keep protective material received during the pandemic that could not be used because they did not have the endorsement of the Preventive Medicine services of the respective hospital centers.
The Ministry details that in the first months of the pandemic the health services of all countries “lacked sufficient protection material for their workers, that in Spain at first there was no capacity or possibility of making direct purchases, so it was received material from centralized purchases and that the acquisition of the material was subject to an unregulated international market”.
Given this evidence, he continues, “the Preventive Medicine services operated with extreme caution so that the material that was distributed among the professionals had the quality guarantees required for protection against covid-19.”
The Ministry of Health clarifies that it has already reported both in parliamentary sessions and in the report of the Hearing of Accounts and to the media that around three million units of different types of materials fell into disuse at the indication of the Prevention physicians, including gloves, screens and hydroalcoholic gel.
Thus, the Ministry has been donating material to different non-health organizations or entities when it was declared unfit for use in the hospital setting and in the last four months a total of 1,046,720 units of reusable material have been distributed for other uses of less requirement than the toilet.