Hospital Amadora-Sintra has set the record straighter since the death on Friday of a 36-year-old heavily-pregnant woman from Guinea, who was sent home with high blood pressure, and told to return in a week for the delivery of her baby.
According to a communique, the woman had in fact been accompanied by the hospital since July. The board of directors was cited as saying: “due to the lack of a fully integrated clinical information system that allows for the automatic sharing of data and medical records between different services and units (…), it was only possible to verify late this afternoon that the patient had been receiving primary healthcare from ULSASI since July 2025, at the Personalised Healthcare Unit (UCSP) in Agualva”.
According to the statement, the woman had two pregnancy monitoring appointments on 14 July and 14 August, and had obstetrics appointments at the hospital on 17 September and 29 October, the latter just hours before she went into cardiorespiratory arrest.
These details are hugely relevant, in that health minister Ana Paula Martins told parliament on Friday not only that the October appointment was the woman’s first, but that issues with women having their babies ‘outside hospitals, in ambulances, on the road’ generally affected “pregnant women who have never been monitored during their pregnancy, are new arrivals in Portugal, are in advanced stages of pregnancy and, in some cases, do not even speak Portuguese.”
If it was not an attempt to deflect blame, it certainly sounded like one – and the family of the dead woman, Umo Cani, have clearly not felt they could remain silent.
Another statement made in the press that the family has taken issue with was that of the director of Amadora-Sintra’s emergency obstetrics department, who said “the accompaniment of (Umo Cani’s) pregnancy was not ideal”.
Umo Cani had come especially to Portugal in order to have good medical care (better than she might have received in Guinea Bissau). She was living in Bissau with her husband, but had been a legal resident of Portugal since December last year – again, another detail absent from original reports put out in national media.
As the Resident reported as an update on our original story, the baby girl delivered in an emergency c-section in the early hours of last Friday never recovered consciousness. She was delivered some hours after her mother’s death – the woman having been kept ventilated, in order for the delivery to be performed once the ambulance team reached Amadora-Sintra hospital.
Just as this report went up online, Lusa announced the resignation of the chairman of Amadora-Sintra’s board of governors, as a direct result of the ‘incorrect information’ having been given to health minister Ana Paula Martins on Friday. The minister told the state news agency: “Precisely because this failure is considered a serious one, he offered his resignation, and I accepted the resignation of the chairman of the board of directors.”
Source material: Correio da Manhã/ SIC Notícias
