Will pay an extra 90% more for surgeries waiting beyond stipulated time
Portugal’s government has created an exceptional incentive scheme to ensure that cancer patients waiting for surgery beyond the recommended time limit are attended.
The scheme involves an additional payment (to hospitals) of 90%, according to an order published today.
The document, published in State gazette Diário da República and signed by the minister of health, Ana Paula Martins, defines “an exceptional incentive scheme to recover surgical care activity in hospitals and resolve the waiting lists of patients with suspected or confirmed oncological disease who are outside the Guaranteed Maximum Response Times (TMRG)”, writes Lusa.
The measure has been put immediately in force and will last until August 31.
According to the decree, the measure cannot be applied to cases of non-compliance within the Guaranteed Maximum Response Times that occur after today.
Health professionals and the managers of health care units and services “must ensure scrupulous compliance with the TMRG , in order to avoid the creation of a new waiting list for oncological surgery”, the document states.
In order for the incentives to be applied, the government stipulates three criteria that must be met cumulatively: users must be on the registration list, preferably fulfil the criterion of seniority in registration, and the TMRG must have already been exceeded.
The decree also states that priority must be given to patients with malignant diseases, to the detriment of patients with benign pathologies, “unless there is due clinical justification”.
In January, the Health Regulatory Authority (ERS) revealed that 19% of cancer patients who underwent surgery in public hospitals in the first half of last year were treated with waiting times longer than those established by law.
According to the ERS’s analysis of waiting times in the health service (SNS), in the first half of 2023, 30,697 scheduled surgeries were carried out in public hospitals in the area of oncology, which is 1% less than in the same period in 2022.
Around 19% were treated with waiting times longer than those established by legislation and, as of June 30, 2023, more than 7,000 users were waiting for scheduled surgery in oncology, 18% of whom were waiting longer than the TMRG.
Following release of this data, the director of the National Programme for Oncological Diseases at the DGS (Directorate-General for Health) defended the need to review and “shield” the criteria for calculating TMRG, warning that the system allowed results to be made up.
“The system, as it is at the moment, makes it possible to make up results and this can’t happen. The system must be armoured. And this is what we want,” said José Dinis.
Recognising that, at the time of its creation, the Guaranteed Maximum Response Times measure was “a stone in the ground”, the specialist considered that the whole process should now be “reviewed, from how it is defined to how it is implemented”, given the inconsistencies in the application of this mechanism.
Dinis explained that the way waiting times are calculated, both in-hospital and inter-hospital, is not objective enough, allowing identical cases to have different responses.
“The same tumour in one hospital can have one classification and in another health unit another. And that’s what we want to standardise in the national strategy to fight cancer,” he said, adding that the same tumour can be classified as “priority” in one hospital and “very priority” in another.
Source: LUSA
