In a final ruling, the Supreme Court has upheld a key principle for emergency medical service personnel in the Canary Islands: the time spent at the base by air medical service doctors and nurses must be counted as actual work time. This concludes a long-running legal battle initiated by air medical personnel against the public company Gestión de Servicios para la Salud y Seguridad en Canarias (GSC), which is dependent on the regional government.
The ruling, which upholds the criteria already adopted by the High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC), represents a historic victory for emergency service workers and sets a key precedent for the legal treatment of on-call shifts under European law. For years, GSC applied an interpretation according to which the time healthcare workers remained at base awaiting activations was not considered ordinary working hours or rest, but rather a kind of "intermediate category" with reduced pay and without the full legal effects of working hours.
This position has been dismantled by the courts. The Supreme Court rejects the existence of this intermediate category and supports the doctrine of the High Court of Justice of the European Union (TSJC), which had already warned that such a model violates Directive 2003/88/EC on working time and the established case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The ruling not only recognizes the time spent on-site as effective working hours, but also requires adjusting back pay, reorganizing shifts, guaranteeing statutory rest periods, and modifying the calculation system for air resources. In other words, it will have an economic and structural impact on the Canary Islands' emergency system.
The CSIF union, which led the defense of the case, and the legal team of labor lawyers involved, hail this ruling as a triumph for labor law in its most essential sense: the protection of the vital time of those who serve human lives. "There can be no emergency workday without rights. This ruling is not just a legal victory, it is a moral victory for all healthcare professionals who wait silently and without visibility, ready to take off in minutes," noted one of the lawyers behind the appeal.
Although the case affects the 112 air service in the Canary Islands, the ruling's scope could extend to other professional bodies with base presence shifts or essential services, both public and private, in the field of emergencies, rescue, or medical care throughout the country. This brings to a close an episode that highlights the persistent friction between outsourced public management models and European regulations on labor protection. And it perhaps reopens a pending debate on the structural underfunding of the emergency system.
