There is confusion today following news in several quarters that hospitals have been ordered to cut back on expenses on medication, additional surgeries (to catch up on waiting lists), agency staff and other hirings.
Multiple sources refer to the order having been given two weeks ago by the executive board of the SNS health service (DE-SNS) at the general assembly of ‘SNS managers’, which was held in Santarém.
Hospital administrators stress they consider the order “incomprehensible”, while Carlos Cortes, president of the Order of Physicians (Ordem dos Médicos) has called it “profoundly lamentable and miserable”.
But was there an order? Is there an order?
Today, the government is insisting that everything has been misunderstood.
Álvaro Almeida, executive director of the SNS (ie the man heading up the executive board) has said in a statement sent to newsrooms that the declarations of the president of the Order of Physicians “are generally false” and “result from the interpretation of an inaccurate journalistic article”.
The journalistic article in question (appearing in Público) went on to be widely repeated – and Almeida’s statement was not actually very clear. In the words of Lusa, it “classified as false the statements made by the head of the Order of Physicians regarding an alleged instruction given to hospitals to cut spending in 2026, without clarifying whether such an order existed”.
“In the statement, the DE-SNS does not specify what false content is contained in Carlos Cortes’ statements, nor does it clarify why the Público newspaper’s report is inaccurate.
“Regarding what happens in internal meetings of the SNS, the executive director makes no public comment, only clarifying that the meeting in question is the Assembly of Managers of the SNS, which brings together the top leaders of the SNS institutions, and not a meeting with hospital administrators.
“Earlier in the morning, the executive director of the National Health Service (SNS), Álvaro Almeida, had already refused to comment on the alleged instruction given to hospitals to cut spending in 2026”, Lusa concludes.
Prime minister Luís Montenegro has perhaps shone more light on the issue. “I want to make it very clear that my position, which is also that of the Prime Minister, is that there should be no reduction in health services or in access to them (…) It is completely false that there is any guidance to reduce the capacity to provide services, or to recover even the speed with which they are provided”.
In short, there are to be no cuts, but “a more efficient use of public money.
“The word ‘cut’ is not correct. There is no guidance to cut anything”, he stressed, although there is an instruction to reduce spending.
If anyone starts feeling dizzy at this point, the prime minister certainly didn’t seem to see a reason for it: “There is a guideline, which is naturally very demanding, but which, I believe, deserves everyone’s understanding, in the sense of being more efficient, in the sense of optimising resources more (…) We don’t want to cut anything. It means managing better, it means fighting waste, it means making better choices when purchasing goods and services, so that we can have the resources we need, so that we can have a remuneration policy, in terms of career development, that is adequate to attract and retain more health professionals in the system.”
The PM then stressed that the health service has a budget of €18 billion for 2026, “which is €10 billion more than 10 years ago” – which really means very little considering the changes on so many levels over the last decade.
But that is where this story has ended up as of lunchtime today: there was a ‘very demanding guideline’ given – not an order – to make better choices in the country’s desperately challenged health service, which at the end of June this year had almost a million citizens waiting for their first hospital consultation, over 192,000 waiting for operations and almost 7,500 patients awaiting surgery for cancers.
Source material: Correio da Manhã/ Lusa/ Jornal de Notícias
