The Directorate of the Lanzarote Health Area and the Management of Health Services of the island met this Thursday with the Directorate of the Canary Islands Health Service to present them with "a strategic document" that establishes the bases for planning the evolution of the health network of Lanzarote and La Graciosa during the next two decades, with the horizon set for 2044.
The delivery of this document occurs just one day after Coalición Canaria "analyzed" the content of the plan at its Lanzarote headquarters. While the party presented the content, the Ministry of Health has refused to publicly present the document in recent days because, according to the party, it would go against the Electoral Law.
Amidst the health debate on the island due to the risk that the Lanzarote Insular Hospital may cease to be a public socio-health center specialized in Geriatrics, Coalición has stated that the plan contemplates as "one of the options" to "restore" the Insular Hospital, to continue "giving it a health and geriatric use." However, it does not detail whether the intention is for that use to continue as a public and hospital center as it has been until now, or if it could end up becoming a residence managed by a private company.
In the meeting with the director of the Canary Islands Health Service, Adasat Goya (CC), the head of the directorate of the plan, prepared by technicians from the public company Gesplan, explained that the document analyzes the current and future needs of the island's health infrastructures and provides a technical basis for anticipating, ordering, and programming the necessary actions, taking into account care, functional, urban planning, economic, and sociodemographic criteria.
This planning has been promoted by the Management of Health Services and prepared by a team of specialist professionals from Gesplan over the last two years.
The plan starts from the need to progressively adapt health infrastructures to the evolution of the population and the care requirements of the coming decades, with the objective of guaranteeing the response capacity of the health system and promoting coordinated planning of available resources.
As explained by Erasmo García, director of the island's Health Area, and the manager of Sanitary Services, Pablo Eguía, at the meeting attended also by the middle managers of the Sanitary Services Management, a public presentation of the document was planned for the second half of the month, but the restrictions foreseen in the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime prohibit the dissemination of future commitments during the electoral period, so the presentation is postponed, although work will continue in working groups, taking the available planning as a reference.
Population growth
The technician responsible for the plan highlighted that one of the most relevant data in the document is the dimension of the growth that the island's health network will need. For the horizon of the next two decades, the analysis adopts a reference population of between 197,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, taking into account the projected evolution of the resident population and the different scenarios of floating population.
In this regard, she pointed out that the document provides a technical basis for evaluating options and defining the corresponding strategic scenario, through the necessary institutional and administrative validation processes.
The growth needs included in the Plan, which serves as a reference for the development of infrastructures, point to a significant increase in health surface area over a 20-year time horizon and organizes possible interventions into three stages to reorganize urgent actions, and those that can be defined in the medium and long term to respond to population growth and future needs.
To determine development alternatives, the document analyzes the capacity for adaptation and expansion of existing infrastructures, urban planning conditions and land availability, estimated investment costs, and the demographic evolution of Lanzarote and La Graciosa. It also specified that the execution of this Master Plan makes it necessary to specify actions through specific functional programs and to establish a progressive, flexible roadmap adjusted to budgetary availability, the operational capacity of the health system, and healthcare needs.
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