FNAM says minister “hasn’t the competence for position”
Yesterday’s charm offensive to address the current (but habitual) ‘chaos’ in Portugal’s SNS state health service went exactly as predicted. But it failed to convince the militant federation of doctors, which is now calling for the dismissal of health minister Ana Paula Martins.
The syndicate that has fallen out of its former lockstep with the more centre-right leaning SIM (Independent Syndicate of Doctors), insists the minister is out of her depth; “hasn’t the competence to exercise her role”. It is calling for “a minister who negotiates with health professionals and persuades them to stay in the SNS”.
FNAM claims that after four months in the job, Ana Paula Martins has “managed to take the SNS to the bottom. What we are witnessing has been catastrophic”, FNAM’s president Joana Bordalo e Sá told SIC yesterday as in Lisbon prime minister Luís Montenegro, President Marcelo and health minister Ana Paula Martins made a high-profile visit to Hospital de Santa Maria, ostensibly to see improvements recently undertaken – but more specifically to ‘calm the rising furore’ over obstetric and pediatric A&E service ‘breakdowns’.
Summertime closures of emergency departments serving pregnant women and children have been habitual for the past three years – but this year the government in place since April is getting it in the neck by dint of the fact that it announced an ‘emergency health programme’ when it took office, to get to grips with the sector’s problems.
Yesterday’s messages from the PM, president and Ana Paula Martins were essentially that ‘Rome was not built in a day’, and that things will be very different by next summer – but the legacy of the last eight years under PS Socialists is a tough one.
It is an argument that could never wash with PS Socialists or syndicates like FNAM, which claims the current constraints are putting lives at risk.
FNAM doesn’t stop there: it also accuses the health minister of “causing problems with INEM” since taking charge, of having ‘attacked hospital administrations’ (meaning criticised, not physically attacked) and of delaying processes to see new doctors admitted.
Joana Bordalo e Sá defends that there are solutions to the problems of the SNS, “but the government doesn’t listen to the doctors”.
In short, she wants to see “a ministerial team with the will to negotiate” – not the one currently in place.
Observers have all been remarking that yesterday’s show at Santa Maria was designed to put pressure on the health minister (as if she needed any more of it…).
Expresso today has cited ‘sources close to the minister’ saying she already feels “fragilised, even within the government executive – and it hasn’t helped that the Accounts Court, earlier this week, condemned her decision-making over INEM’s helicopter services, ordering the ministry to ensure it provides INEM with the budget it needs in future so that it can attract service providers.
As all this was going on, yet another Portuguese citizen was born in an ambulance (this time on the busy Abril 25 bridge) as the mother was in the process of trying to reach a maternity unit that was open. All obstetric emergency services in the ‘Margem Sul do Tejo’ are closed ‘until at least Wednesday’.
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
