Doctors accuse health minister of increasing ‘chaos in public health service’
Portugal’s Ministry of Health will be presenting the balance of its Health Emergency and Transformation Plan today, against the backdrop of new scheduled doctors’ strike, and relentless media reports about upset services.
According to the government, the plan involves 54 measures, 12 of which have been finalised, with the rest “in the implementation phase” (40 “in progress”, two “yet to be started”).
The press conference to present this progress comes roughly 100 days since the plan was approved by the Council of Ministers in May.
Lusa reports that “the ministry considers the following measures completed: regularising the waiting list for cancer patients’ surgery, creating a direct service on the SNS 24 line for pregnant women, strengthening agreements with the social and private sectors, and creating clinical care centres to treat less serious patients.
“Still to come is the creation of the emergency speciality, which involves the Order of Physicians, which recently approved a regulation considered the “first stage” of this process, and the creation of medical and psychological assessment centres – two “measures classified in the plan as a priority and structuring, respectively.
“The plan established three levels of priority: in the first phase, urgent measures (15), to respond to the sector’s most immediate problems; priority measures (24), to respond to the needs identified in the short and medium term, and structuring measures (15), aimed at “transforming reform” of the current health system.
“At the beginning of August, the prime minister said that the government was meeting the targets of the emergency health plan but acknowledged that ‘it would be irresponsible and unrealistic to say that the emergency services are working well’ in the country”.
To be fair, Portugal’s SNS health service has been struggling for years, with enormous waiting lists, shortages of health professionals and perennial union dissatisfaction.
Today’s exercise will be designed to counter the ‘bad press’ that has been reported daily throughout the summer, focusing particularly on the number of babies (41 at last count) that have had to be born in ambulances as their mothers were ferried kilometres out of their areas of residence in a bid to find an open maternity unit.
FNAM, the federation of doctors, has been vociferous in its criticism of health minister Ana Paula Martins, claiming she has increased the chaos already installed in the SNS.
FNAM’s doctors will be holding their next strike on Tuesday September 24 and Wednesday the 25th.
Source material: LUSA
