Executive Directorate reduces number drastically
A technical spat has emerged today over the number of cancer patients waiting for surgeries beyond the ‘maximum guaranteed response time’ (TMRG).
When health minister Ana Paula Martins presented the government’s Emergency Health Plan at the end of May, she said there were 9.374 cancer patients on the waiting list for surgery outside the TMRG. This was not technically correct (as the minister has since acknowledged). That number corresponds to all cancer patients who were still waiting for surgery at the end of April.
Outside the TMRG were ‘only’ 2,645 patients, stresses the Executive Directorate, explaining that the list, at the best of times is ‘dynamic’ as surgeries tend to take place on a daily basis, and there are always “new arrivals with new priorisation times” appearing too.
Tackled over the discrepancy by the parliamentary health committee, Ana Paula Martins explained that the government believes that cancer patients “are always a priority (…) There should not be a single day of waiting for surgery”.
Indeed, she defended the need to ‘revisit priorities and registrations on the surgery list’, writes Lusa.
But, again seemingly at odds with its hierarchy, the Executive Directorate added that “there are more serious patients whose intervention time should be prioritised over oncology patients”, giving examples of cardiac surgery, vascular surgery and/ or neurosurgery.
Lusa concludes that data from Executive Directorate shows that at the end of the first week of June, 9,351 cancer patients were awaiting surgery. There were 2,341 (25%) whose waiting time had already exceeded the TMRG, while in total, more than 275,000 patients were awaiting surgery – 74,617 of them (27.1%) above the TMRG.
Source material: LUSA
