Tenerife hospital, medical and health care provision
Tenerife enjoys full and universal health care provision for its citizens
at the European standard. Prestigious public and private centers provide
the island’s inhabitants with fast, effective and top quality health
care coverage.
The province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has 27 hospital centers, of which 13 are public and 14 private. These centers offer 4,252 beds, with the ratio of beds per inhabitant being 4.96 per one thousand (higher than the Spanish average of 3.96 per one thousand).
As regards health care, Tenerife has a wide network of Primary Care Centers (102 in all of the Canary Islands). The Psychiatric Hospital, which has been providing specialized psychiatric care since 1937, or the Children’s Hospital (Hospital de Niños), specializing in pediatrics, are some of the centers that offer these services. In total, Tenerife has 5,847 medical professionals.
Public health care, under the auspices of the autonomous Canary Islands government, falls within the competence of the Canary Islands Health Service. The leading public health service of the island is the Hospital Complex of Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, which was built in 1966. It handles some 400,000 inhabitants in the island of Tenerife and is accredited by the National Council of Medical Specialities to teach Post graduate Medical Education in 22 specialist subjects. Among the innovations in public health care, it is necessary to point to the possibility of the patient requesting a prior appointment with his main doctor by means of Internet, or campaigns such as that carried out to prevent and control tobacco use. Furthermore, the Canary Island Government has a centralized emergencies center with a single telephone number: 112.
The University Hospital of Tenerife, belonging to the Island Council of Tenerife should also be highlighted. This is a health care center of the highest magnitude, whose objective is to provide integral health care and undertake research and teaching, in collaboration with the University of La Laguna. Its intensive work on kidney transplants, started at the beginning of the eighties, is an example of the quality of its service to the population, and of the constant progress made in private health care.
Considerable network of private hospitals
Among the private health care centers we can highlight Hospiten, a network with over 850 beds, with numerous centres both on the island and outside it. In addition, there are other private clinics spread all over the island, that also have cutting edge technology, such as the Santa Cruz Clinic or the Capote Clinic, which is a point of reference in terms of magnetic resonance.
On the other hand, there are currently 38 senior citizens’ residences with 2,214 places and 53 centres for the elderly.