A nurse from the Doctor José Molina Orosa Hospital denounces that the Lanzarote Health Services Management has refused to adapt her temporary contract to allow her to care for one of her three children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This healthcare worker and her husband, originally from Gran Canaria and Tenerife, arrived on the island this year after he was assigned to work in Lanzarote. As she could not care for her 10, 4, and 2-year-old children alone, she decided to move to the island as well.
According to her account, her contract is valid until March 2027, but she requested from the Lanzarote Health Services Management, through official channels, an adaptation of her working hours to a fixed morning shift to ensure the care of her son, who has a recognized disability rating and a Grade III dependency resolution, the highest. This requires his parents to provide the child with "unavoidable and continuous" support, as this condition necessitates therapies fundamental for his development and daily quality of life.
However, this nurse assures that far from helping her, the Management's response has been "intolerably cruel." After meeting with the Nursing Director of Molina Orosa, she states that the director addressed her with terms like "churrina", and even made statements minimizing her problem such as "there is no work-life balance shift in this hospital", "I'm not going to take a colleague's morning shift to give it to you either," or "why did you accept the contract?".
Following this verbal response, the nurse requested a written response from the director to have a record and be able to claim, even through legal channels, a solution. However, her husband has stated that "the union has already told us that this way it would be delayed for several years, and we don't have several years to solve it." Despite having requested this written response, they say that the Management has not yet sent it, so they filed a complaint to which La Voz has had access.
Being from other islands and having no other family in Lanzarote, these parents find themselves in a critical situation "to meet the basic needs of our children, especially those of the youngest with autism."
They threaten to expel her from the hiring list until 2027
The Management recently offered the nurse a temporary contract. However, she explains that the staffing plan "imposed extreme rotating shifts on me, including 12, 16, and even 24-hour on-call duties." After begging them to adapt this new contract to the morning shift due to her son's severe dependency, she states that they "responded that it was impossible."
Furthermore, she points out that "the most serious" aspect of this response is that the Management warned her that if she rejects this temporary position because the shifts prevent her from caring for her son, they will penalize her by removing her from the hiring list until April 2027.
"They are forcing me to choose between abandoning my son with autism or giving up the contract improvement that feeds my family and helps me pay for his therapies. This is very cruel: the same public health system that should look out for the most vulnerable is punishing and leaving one of its own nurses without rights for trying to protect a severely dependent and autistic minor, completely ignoring our total lack of support on this island," she states.
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