Patients will be able to discover which hospitals could perform surgeries soonest
A brave new plan to vastly improve the way Portugal’s state health service organises surgeries is going to be trialed later this year, and should extend to the whole country by November.
It involves a new hotline (the SNS already has a 24-hour line, and a Pregnancy Line).
According to Expresso, the service will allow patients waiting for operations to discover where they stand in terms of numbers on the waiting list, how long it will take before they are called for surgery, and which hospitals (either public, private or in the social sector) are available to perform it.
The idea is also that people will be able to choose where they would like to be operated.
None of this happens at the moment, leading to months, if not years sometimes, of misery. In the Algarve, for example, where there has been a chronic shortage of surgeons, some patients have already managed to ‘jump waiting lists’ by agreeing to be operated in other parts of the country (like the Alentejo). This is essentially what this new hotline aims to normalise: better access to necessary care.
The ideas have all been put to health minister Ana Paula Martins by a working group appointed to design a new model for surgical waiting lists.
The beauty of the plan is that it will not leave ‘non-state’ hospitals waiting to be sent ‘surgical authorisations/ vouchers’ from the SNS when the SNS is unable to perform surgeries in good time.
“If there is no state hospital able to respond in time, the patient will automatically referred to the private sector, and informed that he/ she can contact the hotline to make a choice (of hospital). Another possibility is the private hospitals and/ or those in the social sector can access the request for surgery and offer themselves ‘proactively’ to the patient, to be operated”, working group coordinator Joana Mourão tells Expresso.
To ease the process along, ‘habitual’ surgical vouchers that used to be emitted once waiting times had gone on for too long are to be substituted by a simple bar code, that will accompany the patient from the start of the process, to the end.
The country’s ‘surgical panorama’ will be uploaded onto an online platform so that the entire list of waiting patients and response capacity by geographical and national area will be available for all to see.
The new model is going to start being tested in September in the local health units of Coimbra and Alto Ave, and in the IPO cancer hospital of Lisbon, and then should extend to the rest of the country by November.
Source material: Expresso/ SIC Notícias
