A doctor used by Portimão Hospital has been sacked for telling a patient he would be better off in the private system. And it is not an isolated incident.
Correio da Manhã newspaper reports that health minister Paulo Macedo has confirmed “various cases” in the last month of doctors under investigation for advising patients to leave the state system.
The only oncologist at Torres Vedras Hospital, for instance, has now tendered her resignation, saying the hospital had refused to treat six to eight patients for “economical, less than ethical” reasons, says the newspaper.
In Portimão, the controversy also centres on cancer treatment. It follows a doctor, hired from an “outside clinic” – due to staff shortages in the hospital – telling a foreign patient that he couldn’t be treated in the public system, “and should go private”.
The doctor then discharged the patient, so that the latter could indeed seek treatment elsewhere.
Hospital director Pedro Nunes has assured reporters that the doctor has been dropped by the hospital. He said the patient in question was seriously ill and had complained about the doctor’s behaviour.
“We’re adamant that this cannot be allowed to happen,” Nunes told the Algarve Resident. “People who come to a state hospital have to feel confident that we will treat them, that we can treat them, and that is why we have to be rigorous in the way we deal with such a situation.”
Portimão’s administrators have sent a written complaint to the Public Prosecutor as well as the medical registry (Ordem dos Médicos), and Nunes confirmed the case “is being investigated”.
It is yet another incident that has put Portimão’s CHA hospital and its director in the spotlight. Pedro Nunes is already locked in a political fight with the local council which considers the recent cost-cutting fusion with Faro Hospital detrimental to local people’s health.
Recent news stories about the huge cost of hiring doctors from outside clinics add fuel to the climate of controversy. Correio da Manhã claims Portimão Hospital has spent more than €880,000 since the hospital merger contracting the services of outside specialists.
“Their figures aren’t quite right,” Nunes told us. “But the costs are still very, very high. We’re working hard to turn things round and are convinced that within two years or so the picture will have improved.”
