The informal meeting of Health Ministers that the European Union held these days in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria coincides with the controversy raised between the SCS and the Mogán City Council over the so-called “social health transit centers”
The informal meeting that brings together 34 European Union Health Ministers in Gran Canaria due to the Spanish Presidency of the EU comes at a time of tension in the island health sector. The reason is the designation of a “social health transit center” in Mogán. A center designed for those patients who continue to occupy a bed in a public hospital despite having been discharged.
The center is located in the Palmera Mar Apartments, on Amadores beach in the municipality of Mogán. After a series of adaptation and conditioning processes, the center was baptized as “a new transit resource.” Health had planned to start sending patients as soon as possible to relieve the pressure on the Canary Islands Health System, but they have encountered a refusal from the mayor of Mogán, Onalia Bueno.
The first mayor of the Moganero municipality justifies her refusal on the illegality of the use proposed by the SCS on tourist land and that the tourist complex, despite the conditioning, does not meet the appropriate conditions to accommodate people with the needs that the patients have.
For now, given this clash between the Canarian Health Service and the Mogán City Council, the sending of patients to this complex has been stopped, where they plan (or planned) to house more than fifty people.
However, 22 had already been sent in recent days while waiting for a place in a socio-health center on the island and are left in a situation of uncertainty without knowing whether the criteria of the SCS or the protests of the Mogan town council will prevail. Esther Monzón, Minister of Health, has assured that if the healthcare use of the tourist complex is not viable, these patients will be relocated.
Despite this tense situation in which it does not seem that there will be an understanding between the SCS and the Mogán City Council and where around twenty patients and their families are waiting to find out what will become of them; forty kilometers away from the Palmera del Mar apartments, this issue does not seem to matter too much at an informal meeting of European Health Ministers who have focused their talks on mental health, digital health and the establishment of a single market for medicines in EU territory.
