Management admit “implementing measures that upset vested interests”
The pressure from within certain factions of the SNS health service to keep the spectre of unrest running high has resulted in new headlines: 19 A&E doctors at one of Greater Lisbon’s largest hospitals are threatening to walk out due to work overload.
They have written a long (open) letter to management (the ULS Amadora-Sintra) warning that the service “runs the risk of rupture”. Their ‘beef’ this time is with the recent opening of the Hospital de Sintra (an initiative paid for and delivered to the state health service by the Socialist municipality of Sintra) and the fact that this is taking doctors away from Amadora-Sintra in order to work shifts.
As a result, the doctors claim that the waiting times at Amadora-Sintra have skyrocketed – a situation that Hospital de Sintra was designed to alleviate, not exacerbate.
Only a week or so ago, television channels were broadcasting the ‘wonder’ of Hospital de Sintra: how it was seeing patients without long queues, and how these patients were very glad of its existence.
Now, the flip side of the coin.
Said Luís Campo Pinheiro of the southern branch of the Order of Physicians, the doctors’ “cry of alert cannot be ignored. Management has to talk with the doctors; it has to listen to the doctors, and above all, be advised by the doctors…”
Campos Pinheiro tells Correio da Manhã that doctors are objecting to finding their shifts ‘changed’ at the last minute, from Amadora-Sintra to Hospital de Sintra. It is something the Order “cannot accept”, he explains.
Management for its part has said that it will start having meetings with doctors, individually, in a bid to find solutions.
In a statement, the administrative council of ULS Amadora-Sintra has said that it is “implementing various measures to improve the A&E service” at the hospital, including redirecting non-urgent patients and low level emergencies to Hospital de Sintra.
“A new coordinator has also been hired to manage the joint emergency services of the two hospitals.
And “the creation of a Responsibility Centre for the emergency area is currently being prepared. This organisational innovation will bring significant advantages in terms of both management and compensation for professionals working in emergency services, based on criteria of productivity and quality of care”, says the statement – admitting that these alterations will “inevitably affect certain vested interests, which can generate resistance such as that which is currently being seen”.
The lines are drawn: it is yet another ‘summer of discontent’ in the SNS health service, but this summer, very much like last, sees a lot of pressure for health minister Ana Paula Martins to throw in the towel: something she has repeatedly said she will not be doing. Even today, publishing the story about the doctors’ Open Letter, Correio da Manhã carries one of its famous ‘thumbs down’ next to a photograph of the minister, saying this situation simply adds to all the others that have been laid at her door.
The real tragedy is that this latest uproar centres on the existence of a project powered by a municipality, paid for by a municipality, to try and improve healthcare in the area.
Source material: LUSA/ Correio da Manhã
