The deputy of Lanzarote and La Graciosa for Nueva Canarias (NC) and island president of the formation, Yoné Caraballo, announced this Monday at a press conference in the Parliament of the Canary Islands that he has registered a Non-Law Proposal (PNL) which includes the "historical demand" for the medicalized helicopter permanently based in Lanzarote. This was stated by Caraballo, who spoke together with the 43,096 signatures collected on the Change.org platform since the 'Time Is Life' campaign began in January 2020.
“A collection of signatures that has not stopped being active since 2020 with more than 43,000 people who want to improve the health services of Lanzarote and La Graciosa, given that many of them have suffered both personally and within their families the unfortunate conditions in transfers to hospitals in Gran Canaria and Tenerife”, says Caraballo.
According to Caraballo, “this historical demand has had a somewhat curious journey, since the first time I spoke about the medicalized helicopter for Lanzarote I was labeled as “crazy” and “populist”, and in just two years both CC and PP incorporated it into their proposals, even generating an alternative signature collection such as the one prepared by the PP in 2022”.
For Yoné Caraballo, this urgent health transport service "is more than justified given the number of transfers of patients from Lanzarote to the reference hospitals of Gran Canaria and Tenerife, which in 2023 involved 241 people transferred from Lanzarote."
This service, maintains Caraballo, “will be indicated for critical patients, seriously traumatized patients, newborns and cardiac patients, but, above all, accident victims who are in difficult-to-access and distant areas to the hospital center, with Lanzarote and La Graciosa being the most affected islands because they do not have a rescue helicopter either, which the island of Fuerteventura does have, in addition to soon having the advanced life support helicopter”. A decision, indicates Caraballo, “incomprehensible given that the services could have been distributed on par with the rescue helicopter in Fuerteventura and the medicalized helicopter in Lanzarote”.
All in all, for Yoné Caraballo “this Wednesday the parties in the government of the Canary Islands, CC and PP, have the opportunity to reverse an unfair situation for Lanzarote and fulfill their electoral promises to locate the long-awaited medicalized helicopter on the island”.