A day hospital for eating disorders, two home-care units for children and teenagers, a new unit for people living with personality disorders. This isn’t a wish list for some future project. These are seven facilities the Canary Islands government has begun rolling out since early 2026, the first concrete step in a health strategy that runs through 2032.
Among the new resources is a mental health unit at the Telde health centre and a day hospital dedicated to eating disorders at the La Orotava health centre in Tenerife. Two Home-Based Care Units for children and adolescents, both operating in Tenerife, join a new medium-stay resource in Gran Canaria. Rounding out the list are two day hospitals for people with personality disorders, one at Hospital Universitario Nuestra Señora de Candelaria and the other at Hospital Universitario de Gran Canaria Doctor Negrín. The announcement came from the regional health minister, Esther Monzón.
These resources sit within a wider framework, the Strategy for Health Promotion and Wellbeing in the Canary Islands 2026-2032, presented in late 2025 with the stated goal of narrowing health inequalities and improving the population’s wellbeing. The document deliberately widens the traditional scope of public health, treating emotional and mental wellbeing, sexual and affective health, sleep, the use of information technologies, safe living environments and even oral health as factors to be tracked in an integrated way.
Schools get their own chapter. The Suicide Prevention Programme in Educational Settings has been running for some time across every public school in the archipelago, and in 2025 alone it trained more than a thousand professionals, teachers and school staff among them. That detail points to something bigger: in Canarian health planning, mental health is no longer treated as a separate line item but as an ordinary part of public healthcare, on the same footing as cardiology or paediatrics.
What’s still an open question is how quickly these seven new units will translate into shorter waiting times and easier access for the people who need them, longtime residents and newcomers alike. That’s the real test of a plan that, on paper, is already looking as far ahead as 2032.
