The association The Patient Ombudsman ensures that the emergencies of the Insular University Hospital of Gran Canaria Are the third in the entire country that generate the most complaints, just behind the hospitals in La Paz (Madrid) and A Coruña.
“The personnel deficit and the structural problems of the Emergency Service of the Island of Gran Canaria have also given a lot to talk about, reaching an unsustainable point before the departure of 36 doctors in the last five years”, warns in a report published this Monday.
This association explains that the complaints it receives from public health users regarding emergencies are similar throughout the country: “overcrowded patients due to lack of space, insufficient number of beds, hours of waiting to receive assistance, brutal collapse, erroneous organizational management, etc.
Its report does not detail how many of the 303 complaints it received last year in the Canary Islands (169 corresponding to the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and 134 to Las Palmas) correspond to that emergency service, but it does include a “ranking” of which are the hospitals from which it receives the most complaints.
Hospitals with the most complaints in the Canary Islands
It is headed by the University Hospital of the Canary Islands (HUC), from Tenerife; followed by the Insular of Gran Canaria; Our Lady of La Candelaria de Candelaria, from Tenerife, Doctor Negrín, from Gran Canaria; and Doctor José Molina Orosa, from Lanzarote.
According to the Patient Ombudsman, the issues related to hospitals that generate the most discontent in the Canary Islands are, in this order, emergencies, waiting lists, the general surgery service, the traumatology service and the gynecology and obstetrics service.
Of the 303 complaints that the Patient Ombudsman has received from the Canary Islands, 18 correspond to cases in which the patient died.
“The cases have increased by a total of 50, which represents a rise of 16%. But, without taking into account the data of last year, in which the interventions were reduced and suspended as a result of covid-19, the community The Canary Islands register the lowest number of complaints in the last decade, in which, if we take the average, it turns out that 351 cases usually occur each year,” he points out.
Regarding the waiting lists, The Patient Ombudsman takes as a reference the latest data published by the Canary Health Service (related to June 30, 2021) to highlight that the islands are above the average in waiting days for a surgery (126). That figure is the seventh highest in the country.
“To which we must add that there are 27,499 canaries covering it. The patients who remain ankylosed for the longest time are found in ophthalmology, neurosurgery, vascular surgery and plastic surgery,” he says.
In this regard, recall that the Government of the Canary Islands has announced that it will allocate 140 million euros to personnel to reduce waiting lists by 30% and ensure that the average delay does not exceed 90 days.
The report by The Patient Ombudsman also mentions the protests by doctors who denounce that they suffer abuse of temporary contracting by public health.
“As in other regions, Primary Care is the great victim of the pandemic, which has led to a boom in the private insurance archipelago; in a way, it is being dismantled to justify its privatization,” he says.
From his point of view, “it is obvious that Canarian health is suffering a significant deterioration as a result of an inadequate optimization of human and material resources” and that “the duties of the Government are piling up: lack of oncologists in Lanzarote, the radiotherapy bunker and the hemodynamics unit in Fuerteventura, the construction of the La Candelaria Emergency Service or the expansion project for the Materno Infantil de Gran Canaria.
