The accidental president and Minister of Health of the Island Council of Lanzarote, Manuel Fajardo, met this Tuesday morning at the Corporation's Presidency with the president of the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Spanish Red Cross on the Island, Arturo Ramírez.
This meeting, which lasted more than an hour, is part of the different meetings that Manuel Fajardo has planned in preparation for the monographic plenary session on Health, to be held in the Cabildo of Lanzarote in the month of September or October. Previously, on August 5, the councilor received the municipal representatives of this area in the different town councils of the Island.
With this intention, the accidental president is gathering first-hand information from all the institutions and organizations that work in the health sector of Lanzarote, so the meeting with Red Cross officials was a must.
Manuel Fajardo stressed that from now until the celebration of the plenary session he will hold new meetings with "people directly related to the health problem of the Island." In fact, both leaders agreed this Tuesday to meet again at the end of August or the beginning of September, "before the second meeting we will hold with the councilors responsible for Health in the different town councils, and in which the intervention of the Red Cross will be collected in that plenary session."
And Fajardo has made it clear that in that next session he does not intend that "only politicians speak, but all those who really know first-hand the health deficiencies of Lanzarote".
Island competences and regional items
Although neither the accidental president of the First Institution nor the leader of the Red Cross advanced the specific aspects on which they focused on the meeting, and which will be reflected in Ramírez's intervention in the monographic plenary session, they did highlight that the Cabildo of the island of Lanzarote offers, unlike other councils, a series of health services included in an island network, "such as the displacement of the elderly, for example", and that in the case of other islands it is the task of the town councils themselves, which solve this type of services through simple agreements.
"That is why," said Fajardo at the end of the meeting, "today there is another reason to demand from the Government of the Canary Islands sufficient budget items so that the Cabildo of Lanzarote can continue to address problems that should be solved by the regional Executive itself."
In this sense, the head of Health of the First Lanzarote Corporation explained that he shares the opinion that "the user does not care who should be the competent body to solve their problems, but what they want is for it to be solved without further ado, and that is the main mission that any politician on the Island should have."
Fajardo concluded his words insisting on "the magnificent work that the Red Cross has always carried out in our land, playing a very important role in the health field of the entire Archipelago and, more specifically, on the island of Lanzarote."
For his part, the president of the Red Cross, Arturo Ramírez, stressed that in the meeting the NGO had provided its point of view, since it is an organization "with ambulances throughout the Island, and that daily provides emergency services, so we feel the deficiencies."
These shortcomings occur both in emergency services and in daily tasks. "The councilor has invited us to participate in the next plenary session so that we can tell the proposals that we have presented to him today, and thus debate them with the rest of the professionals and institutions with whom the councilor plans to meet."
Regarding the main health deficiencies, Ramírez highlighted the high number of foreigners who live on the Island, certain deficiencies that usually occur in emergency services, preventive services, interventions on beaches.
Likewise, the president of the Red Cross conveyed to Fajardo the internal news of the NGO. "We have bought two new ambulances that will arrive in November, an adapted transport vehicle to support the service we provide in the day centers supervised by the Cabildo, the Insular Hospital and the Las Cabreras center, and we have detailed to the councilor our day to day" in the Insular Emergency Coordination Center, "the only one that exists in all the Canary Islands apart from the one that has 1-1-2, which manages more than 120,000 annual calls from the residents of Lanzarote, and from which, like last year, we carried out more than 10,000 emergency services", he added.