Four euros an hour for night duty: why the Canaries are losing their nurses to Switzerland

It is a figure that sounds like an alarm at first hearing: 108 nurses from the Canaries applied in 2025 for the certificate that many countries require before hiring foreign healthcare staff. The «certificado de buena conducta» has become a gauge of how many Spanish nurses are planning to leave.

Nationwide, 1,356 people submitted that application, a good 20 percent more than the year before. That puts the Canaries fifth among Spain's regions.

The preferred destinations: Norway, the United States, Switzerland and Ireland.

The paradox: well staffed, and leaving anyway

But the story behind the figure is not the one you would expect. The Canaries do not suffer from a numerical shortage of nurses — at least not by Spanish standards.

According to the «Informe de ratios 2025» by the Consejo General de Enfermería, Spain's nursing council, the islands have 7.71 nurses per 1,000 inhabitants. That is the third-highest figure in the country, clearly above the national average of 6.45.

Only Navarre (8.97) and the Basque Country (8.21) do better.

The European average, however, stands at 8.12. To reach it, the council calculates, Spain is short of some 100,000 nurses.

So the Canaries look good domestically, yet remain below the mean in European terms.

When staffing is relatively dense and people still want to go, the problem does not lie with the number of posts. It lies with the conditions.

What the union says

Yoel Hernández, general secretary of the nursing union SATSE in the Canaries, called the situation «worrying» in a radio interview. He also warns against reading the 108 applications in isolation: they must be set against the total number of nurses in the archipelago — and then the problem takes on «a somewhat larger dimension».

That is a union position, but methodologically it holds.

SATSE names several specific points. First, temporary contracts: agreements lasting days or weeks, with little access to permanent posts.

Second, the pay for on-call and night duty, which according to Hernández comes to around four euros an hour.

Third, a point that weighs particularly heavily: the Canaries are, he says, the only region in Spain that does not pay nurses for their specialist training. Anyone who specialises completes six years of education — four of degree study, two of specialisation.

Corresponding posts and allowances do not exist. You cannot, as Hernández puts it in substance, expect to deploy specialist nurses without paying anything for them.

Added to this are shifts of up to 24 hours — Hernández stresses that this burden does not fall on doctors alone — along with the island-specific factors: double insularity, one of the most expensive shopping baskets in Spain, and the housing and mobility crisis.

The nursing council's position

Florentino Pérez Raya, president of Spain's nursing council, likewise attributes the exodus to precarious employment. It is dramatic, he argues, that Spanish universities produce thousands of nurses each year with one of the best educations in the world, who then go abroad because of poor conditions and excessive workloads.

The council is calling on the Ministry of Health and the regions for stable contracts, an end to rolling temporary employment and recognition of specialist qualifications.

What the administration points to

The Canarian government's health department points to recent improvements. In June 2025 the Servicio Canario de Salud (SCS) introduced the fifth level of the professional career ladder — including for temporary and substitute staff.

That made the Canaries the second region in Spain, after Andalusia, to have five career levels.

In March 2026 the SCS paid the variable productivity supplement in full to the entire workforce. Since 2024, staff have had seven days of discretionary leave per year.

For 2026, more than 1,500 new posts have been advertised, a large share of them in nursing. On top of that comes an insularity supplement of roughly 150 to 220 euros a month depending on the island, along with the tax advantage of the IGIC compared with mainland VAT.

These measures do not refute the criticism — but they show that the debate is moving. On the union's central charges, in particular the absence of pay for specialist training and the hourly rate for night duty, no public statement from the SCS was available at the time of publication.

Why this matters to readers here

For residents, expatriates and holidaymakers in the Canaries this is no abstract staffing question. Anyone living here is covered by the Servicio Canario de Salud and meets precisely these people in hospital or at the health centre.

And the direction of travel carries a particular note for readers from German-speaking countries: Canarian nurses are leaving for Switzerland, among other places — the very country many residents on the islands come from. The European labour market for healthcare staff has long been a competition, and the Canaries are not at its most favourable end.