SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Oct. 10 (EUROPA PRESS) –
A team of health workers from the SAMU Foundation left this Tuesday from Seville to the island of El Hierro to join the Canary Islands Government’s device to care for migrants in the middle of the largest migration crisis in the region since 2006.
The archipelago has received more than 4,500 people in nine days (2,300 of them have arrived on the smallest of its islands) and the care capacities available to the autonomous community have been overwhelmed.
The SAMU contingent is made up of five specialists, including nurses, emergency health technicians and a mediator, who will join the troops available to the foundation in the Canary Islands. The device is equipped with first-aid health intervention materials to immediately welcome and care for people who arrive in cayucos.
The health workers go to the port of La Restinga. The SAMU management works in coordination with the Ministry of Social Rights, Equality, Diversity and Youth, and with the general directorate of Child and Family Protection of the Government of the Canary Islands, and with the Health Services Management of El Hierro.
In the first nine days of October, the Canary Islands have received 4,531 immigrants arriving in 53 boats, at a rate of 503 people per day, unprecedented numbers since the cayucos crisis of 2006, when the Canary Route marked its all-time high.
This situation has caused the collapse of reception resources. The main problem occurs in the care of unaccompanied foreign minors, who outnumber the adult migrants welcomed in the archipelago.
SAMU and the Government of the Canary Islands have been collaborating closely for some time on various assistance fronts. This relationship became stronger after the Canary Islands migration crisis of 2020. In November of that year, SAMU deployed an emergency device in the area and began a campaign to provide care and assistance to unaccompanied migrant minors with the commissioning of a Emergency Temporary Shelter Unit (UATE) in the town of Puerto Rico (Gran Canaria), with capacity for 150 minors.
Currently, SAMU manages a total of 11 resources in the autonomous community of the Canary Islands aimed at minors between UATE resources, homes and day centers. In 2022, SAMU cared for a total of 396 minors and 159 former wards in these centers.
ABOUT SAMU FOUNDATION
SAMU Foundation is an entity specialized in health emergencies and is also one of the main global operators in residential care and emergency shelters. The last migration crisis in which the organization participated occurred in Ceuta in May 2021, with the arrival of more than 12,000 people in just 48 hours. SAMU was on the front line of this crisis from the first arrivals and, in the midst of the crisis, it managed to care for almost a thousand minors in three different resources.
The last international mission of the organization has been carried out in Morocco, during the last month, after the earthquake that devastated a large rural area south of Marrakech.
