New delay in the demolition of the CULP and 600,000 euros more

New delay in the demolition of the CULP and 600,000 euros more

Recent image of / Juan Carlos Alonso

Island Hospital

“Unforeseen materials and damage due to falling materials” inside the old building delay the work on the annex of the Insular Hospital and the unblocking of the collapse of its Emergency service

Odra Rodriguez Santana

The
construction of the annex building of the Insular Hospital of Gran Canaria will have to wait even longer. At least, until next December and that, if there is no new inconvenience. The delay in
demolition of the old building of the University College of Las Palmas (CULP), space where it will be located, leaves the start date of the long-awaited work in the air, once again causing significant damage to the health center, professionals and users.

The tender for the project to demolish the three-story building with 21,000 square meters and built on a plot of 10,724 square meters was scheduled for the
first fortnight of March, according to Conrado Domínguez, director of the Canary Islands Health Service (SCS), in an interview with this newspaper. However, the location of
unforeseen materials and damage material falls» inside the old Faculty of Medicine forced the health administration to modify the current plan.

The CULP, a work of 36.7 million to relieve the Insular

The new project, supervised by the Infrastructure service of the SCS, would be about to
“to be tendered in the coming weeks” for an amount that has already increased to
Two millions of euros, according to the health administration. The previous report alluded to the fact that the bidding process would be at the end of March or the beginning of April for 1,384.651 euros: 741,386 euros for demolition, 348,863 euros for waste management and 44,702 euros for safety and health of the operators and five months of term.

This new setback again moves the solution away from the
healthcare collapse of the Emergency service and the lack of acute hospitalization beds in the Insular, which the professionals of the hospital
have been claiming for decades and that has provoked denunciations, strikes, systematic protests, deluges of complaints and criticism for the
serious shortcomings presented by the facilities of this hospital center that cares for the population of southeastern Gran Canaria.

Six floors to expand the Insular

Parallel to the new CULP tender, the Canary Health Service indicates that it is working on the construction project of the future Insular annex "in order to put it out to tender as soon as possible," the official source clarifies.

In this sense, Health tries to build a six-storey building in 21,600 square meters - four above ground and two below ground. Its total cost will be about 36.7 million euros or 45 million if 9 more investment in equipment are added, according to what Domínguez had also advanced to this newspaper, and in which they are placed
all hopes for the ultimate solution to the chaos suffered by the Hospital Insular de Gran Canaria

This construction has been proposed for years as the solution to the
precarious conditions of the Insular Hospital Emergency Department -the coronavirus has further stressed a problem that was already chronic- and that professionals have repeatedly denounced: "It suffers from a perennial problem of overload and collapse of care that is reproduced weekly and that in the last decade has worsened" with the phenomenon of the patients who
without hospital admission criteria and who spend days, weeks and even months” on stretchers in the corridor of the service or who occupy hospital beds despite having been discharged, which affects the circuit of entry and exit of patients.

Insular Emergency Department suffers from a "perennial problem of overload and collapse of care that is reproduced weekly and that has worsened in the last decade"

The staff of the Insular Hospital and, specifically, of the Emergency Service, criticize that the solution has not been addressed "seriously or in the most appropriate way" from any of the health establishments. The structural deficit and the current insufficient physical space of the Emergency Department (1,000 square meters) forced the hospital to
'officialize' the corridors last year with the marking on the floor of the numbering of the stretcher so that professionals work with "certain criteria and order" and where each patient is located.

State of Conservation Report

The building that the Cabildo de Gran Canaria ceded to the Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands -signed on April 11 of this year- is in "good condition", although the existing screens in the block of classrooms show some fissures, but that would not affect the "stability and security of the whole" indicates the report prepared by the SCS technicians.

The fundamental problem of the property derives "from the
lack of structure flexibility of the body located to the east«, in addition to the fact that the cover presents
"deficiencies" that are related to the lack of sealing of the holes where the old extractors that served the library space were connected, and to a greater extent to the
aging of the closure system of the central free space, made up of metal profiles and plastic plates, specifies the analysis of the state of conservation of the old building.

On the other hand, in the body intended for research laboratories, the entire installation system is distributed under the pavement, through a chamber executed between the structural elements, which produces
great modification difficultieswhile imposing an inadequate solution to the pavement of laboratories and offices, he concludes.

Asdadadados professionals insist that the Emergency Department constitutes a reality "unique and incomparable" to the rest of the hospital care services. It is the "most important" gateway to hospitalization services and a "hardly programmable" service, because it provides health care 24 hours a day, 356 days a year and attends to each and every one of the emergency cases that arrive, "without exceptions”,

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