As the wider world seems to be spinning off its axis, Portugal’s prime minister has taken the opportunity to try and calm some of the worrying headlines surrounding the state-run SNS health service.
Everything is going well, he told his audience at the inauguration of the Executive Directorate of the SNS. It is just that there is a “perception of chaos”.
“This (perception) is not the reality,” he assured.
As for the endless stories of waiting times at hospitals stretching into double figures, these too have to be seen in a more positive light: “waiting times are the best they have been in the last five years”, he assured.
We are living in “strange times”, the PM admitted. There is an “absolute disproportion” between the work that healthcare professionals do in hospitals and the “news frenzy”. (The frenzy that highlighted the plight of a woman with terminal cancer, for example, forced to lie on the floor before she was seen at A&E in Coimbra…This too was a story refuted by Coimbra Hospital authorities, in spite of the testimony of the woman’s own family members.)
For the prime minister: “Every day we are confronted with a perception of chaos, of crisis, of a permanent problem. I don’t want to diminish the cases on which this perception is based. What I have an obligation to do, also on behalf of service providers and professionals, is to say that, fortunately for all of us, this is not the reality that the more than 150,000 daily actions of SNS professionals face every day.”
Mr Montenegro thus warned his captive audience against generalisations. “Waiting times in emergency departments in Portugal are lower than they were last year; lower than they were two years ago, lower than they were three, four, and five years ago. They are the best in the last five years! They are the best from a performance point of view. I repeat, this is not a reason for us to be satisfied, because we can still improve even more.”
This news came through from state news agency Lusa which has not explained how Mr Montenegro’s audience reacted. Rapturous applause? Shouts of “For he’s a jolly good fellow”? We are not told.
TVI does explain, however, that this ‘perception of chaos’ could be ‘all the fault of the increase in the number of people seeking the help of Portuguese state healthcare’. A situation, in other words, of ‘the SNS would work so much better if it didn’t have so many patients’.
Said the PM: “Our national health system has the difficulty of seeing many of its qualified staff seeking opportunities abroad and, therefore, seeing many of its human resources migrate, while at the same time seeing many migrants entering the country who are, quite rightly, entitled to healthcare.”
Suddenly, it was all down to “the increase in the resident population in Portugal, mainly as a result of the migratory cycles we have experienced in recent years”, which pose “a new challenge that the SNS was not so accustomed to” before – but is nonetheless doing a ‘marvellous job’ at dealing with.
Strange times indeed.
Source: LUSA/ TVI
