Government “regrets” situation and orders ‘internal audit’
Portugal’s emergency medical services are in “chaos”, claims STEPH (the syndicate of pre-hospital emergency technicians), citing various examples of the “collapse of the system”, which the union says has resulted in the deaths of two people, in Bragança and Tondela, due to delays in answering 112 medical emergency calls.
With the government “regretting the deaths that occurred, the circumstances of which are being investigated”, STEPH insists that the 112 emergency line is operating with less than half the technicians necessary for the service – hence the delays in answering calls.
According to Rui Lazaro, president of STEPH, of the 1480 technicians needed to man 112 lines in the various CODU (Orientation centres for urgent patients), there exist only 700.
The first death resulting from this overload took place on Thursday October 31 – a day when there were more than 100 simultaneous calls waiting to be answered, Lazaro has told reporters.
The victim – a man aged 75 – was in cardiorespiratory arrest. His wife, making the 112 call, had to wait over an hour for someone to respond, by which time “nothing could be done to save him”, says STEPH.
On the same day in Vinhais, a 64-year-old man suffered an accident, and had to be transported to A&E in Bragança, where he is now an inpatient, by his daughter “because she could not get her call to 112 answered”, the syndicate adds in a communiqué.
The second death was recorded yesterday in Molelos, Tondela: “A 94-year-old woman in cardiorespiratory arrest waited more than 40 minutes to see the call about her attended by the CODU”. She ‘died on the way to hospital’.
As STEPH insists, constraints caused by a shortage of pre-hospital emergency technicians are already well documented, and continue to get worse “without any concrete measures being taken by government”.
The dilemma also sees increasing numbers of staff abandoning “the only profession that operations exclusively in medical emergencies”.
Thus, the government’s interest in saying that it has “requested an internal audit of INEM to assess the conditions in which two deaths occurred in the last three days due to alleged delays in answering the 112 line”.
The internal audit, which should be completed within a month, will also assess “the delays that are being experienced in answering other emergency calls, at a time when Pre-Hospital Emergency Technicians are holding a strike”.
For its part, STEPH says it will not stop filing complaints until concrete measures are taken to “reverse the chaos” of the country’s emergency medical services.
Source material: LUSA
