President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has criticised the “constant changes” affecting Portugal’s health service (SNS) under successive governments.
As a way of establishing a “medium-term framework”, the president of Portugal suggested a political agreement on “the roles of the SNS, the social sector, and the for-profit private sector”.
He was speaking at the end of a conference on the 50th anniversary of the Medical Service in the Periphery, held at ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa on Thursday.
According to the head of state, the government must first decide: “what should be the SNS, what should be the social sector, what should be the for-profit private sector – with enough flexibility to think about the interactions”.
“And what in the SNS, in terms of management, should remain public and what can be shared with the private sector,” he added.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa argued that “without defining this with some clarity, it is very difficult to have a framework for political action”.
The president commented that “it is increasingly difficult” to establish convergences, and “rifts” appear even in such important matters as, for example, the definition of “who is Portuguese, who cannot live in Portugal if they are not Portuguese, of foreign policy, defence, security, and even education”.
Referring to the health sector, he lamented: “If a government ends, another one comes in with a different health policy. Then another one comes in with a different health policy. No health policy can cope; and so, there isn’t one.
“Perhaps it’s time to think that it is not a good idea to change health policy every time a government changes,” he advised.
For the head of state, “the issues that would benefit from this convergence” are essentially two: “the vision of the national health system” and “the vision of the management of the SNS”.
He insisted that “a political choice” must be made about the health system, one that answers the following questions: “What do we want for the SNS? On what terms? What it manages directly, and what it shares or interconnects with other sectors?”
Without defining the role of the SNS, political action becomes “ad hoc”, reacting to “gaps with patches” and “emergency plans”, and “solutions for the very short or short term”, said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
Source: Lusa
