In the early nineties, the Nursing School was created in Lanzarote, dependent on the newly created University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) and with the determined support of the Cabildo of Lanzarote. The ULPGC also ...
In the early nineties, the Nursing School was created in Lanzarote, dependent on the newly created University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) and with the determined support of the Cabildo of Lanzarote. The ULPGC was also a new institution, born in the heat of citizen demand, far from the old centralism of La Laguna and with the spirit of compensating the peripheral islands for the harm they had suffered firsthand.
Lanzarote at that time was already an island in full demographic and economic expansion. Many peninsular provincial capitals, with a similar population, had complete universities and it was logical that the island also had university centers.
In the health field, the expansion of the General Hospital and the opening of new health centers were planned. Health services require personnel with high technical and professional qualifications. The opening of the Nursing School was a strategic decision that avoided the collapse of health services and the hardships of the early nineties, to obtain sufficient nursing staff.
In these 20 years of existence, the Nursing School has trained more than 500 graduates, who have covered the demand for these professionals on our island and in others. They are professionals with a high valuation in the services where they work and excellent training. Many took advantage of the competitive advantage of training in a non-massified center with almost personalized teaching.
This year the adaptation to the European Higher Education Area, also known as the Bologna process, is applied in the Nursing School. This change promotes practical teaching and teaching in small groups, which requires greater effort from the teaching staff, more time and more teachers.
In addition, the ULPGC decided to increase the number of students per course from 30 to 50. Well, despite this greater effort from the teaching staff that is needed, the ULPGC has decided not to renew the contract of 6 of the 15 professors of the nursing department, with which the school had.
Some have been responsible for subjects during these twenty years, or have received extraordinary teaching awards. They were also linked to health institutions, thus providing a practical vision connected to the real world to these studies.
It is a regrettable decision, which will impoverish nursing studies, just when a greater effort from the teaching staff is needed. It is an unfair decision because it dismisses loyal and committed professionals for many years, and it is a harmful decision for the island because it does not contemplate the peculiarities and efforts that the Nursing School has had to suffer to consolidate itself as a university center in a peripheral island, with the good results that it can also exhibit.
The attitude towards Lanzarote of those responsible for the ULPGC is worrying. They already aborted the creation of a business school in Lanzarote (and the courts proved them wrong) and now they are targeting a small nursing school, which thanks to the effort of its teachers, has given such good results and satisfactions, and this despite the little attention that the institutions have paid to it.
The dismantling of the Nursing School of Lanzarote is already a fact. The dismissal of 40 percent of the professors is joined by the already old problem of the building, which they have been unable to solve in 20 years. Does the dismissal of professors have a purely economic cause: saving to hire professors in Fuerteventura, where last year the ULPGC opened a new school, almost without professors? Closing Lanzarote to open in Fuerteventura? The UPGC should explain if it intends to end university education in Lanzarote, because everything points to the fact that with various excuses it will be so.
* Domingo de Guzmán Pérez Hernández, Doctor in Medicine and Surgery and president of the Canary Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology.
