Patients classified as urgent at the Amadora-Sintra hospital in Greater Lisbon are facing 14 hours for their ‘first assessment’ by a doctor this morning, according to data from the SNS portal.
At around 8:00am today, 34 patients who were assigned a yellow (urgent) wristband at the Prof. Dr. Fernando da Fonseca Hospital (Amadora-Sintra) had to wait 14 hours and 45 minutes for an initial assessment.
There were still 16 patients with low-urgency status (green wristband) waiting, after triage, for 16 hours and three minutes to be seen by a doctor.
Other hospitals appear to be faring slightly better:
At Santa Maria Hospital in Lisbon, 12 urgent patients faced a waiting time of six hours and 43 minutes for their first assessment; two patients considered very urgent (orange wristband) had to wait six hours and six minutes.
At Hospital São José, also in Lisbon, the wait was shorter, with the three urgent patients facing a wait of only 56 minutes.
At the Garcia de Orta Hospital in Almada, the wait for the 46 urgent patients exceeded nine hours.
At Beatriz Ângelo Hospital in Loures, the SNS portal indicated that, at 8:00am, 34 urgent patients were waiting nine hours and 55 minutes for their first assessment. There were no patients with orange wristbands waiting.
By comparison, in the North, at São João Hospital in Porto, the 19 patients with yellow wristbands waited ‘only’ three hours and 20 minutes.
According to the SNS triage system, very urgent situations (orange wristband) are recommended to be attended to within 10 minutes of triage, while urgent cases (yellow) require 60 minutes and less urgent cases (green) require 120 minutes.
This kind of attention rarely happens.
And before anyone tries ‘wringing their hands with lamentations’ to blame it all on the ‘terrible flu this year’, hospital directors Xavier Barreto and Carlos Cortes have been telling Diário de Notícias that authorities “are simply reaping what they sowed in terms of planning: nothing”.
These hideous A&E bottlenecks happen every year. “It is always the same”, say the doctors. And the government/ health ministry etc. should have thought ahead a long time ago.
Instead, the authorities are appealing to everyone to ‘get vaccinated’/ ‘wear masks’ and ‘phone SNS24 (808242424) before going to hospital in order to avoid unnecessary trips to emergency rooms’. What they mean by ‘unnecessary’ is if that they can stop people taking their ailments to a hospital: deflect them to health centres or pharmacies, to lighten hospitals’ workload, the reason for seeking help from an A&E department will have been ‘unnecessary’. It doesn’t make the patient’s complaint any better, or any easier: it simply ‘lightens the load of hospital emergency rooms’.
Source material: LUSA/ Diário de Notícias
