SNS winter plan being worked on “six, seven months” in advance
Portugal’s minister of health said on Wednesday that the national health service’s winter plan is being worked on “six, seven months” in advance to anticipate the problems of winter, which is “always a time of great pressure” on services.
“Winter is a very difficult time; if summer is a time of great pressure, winter is a time of much greater and even more significant pressure,” said Ana Paula Martins, adding that the Ministry of Health, the executive board of the National Health Service (SNS), Portugal’s national health authority and the Local Health Units (ULS) are ‘working six, seven months in advance to prepare as soon as possible’ and achieve ‘the best possible results’ for the public.
The minister was speaking to journalists in Tondela, in the district of Viseu, where she inaugurated the refurbishment of the Cândido de Figueiredo Family Health Unit (USF) in Canas de Santa Maria and the Caramulo Pole of the Campo de Besteiros Personalised Health Care Unit (UCSP), an investment of more than €500,000.
Ana Paula Martins said that the goal of preparing the plan in advance is to “be able to anticipate all the problems that are different throughout the country, because the country is not all the same” and to have “the best possible distribution of human resources”.
Asked about the lack of human resources and how this is solved, the minister said that it is “exactly six, seven months in advance to figure out which shifts need the most reinforcement” and that time is “very important” for this planning.
“Naturally, there is always a level of uncertainty in health, which never allows us, it’s completely impossible, to guarantee that everything goes 100%. But if we don’t start working in advance, it certainly won’t go smoothly,” she said.
Asked if the schedules that need more reinforcement have already been identified, the minister said that “the Local Health Units are doing this work, because this is the work of the ULS’s, their clinical directors, their service directors and their emergency department directors”.
The minister stressed that winter, “by nature, is a very difficult period” in addition to summer, because there are “other situations, particularly in terms of respiratory infections that affect older people”.
“That’s why the vaccination campaign should be brought forward as much as possible, but what I want to say is that winter is always a time of great pressure on the health services and that this year, as soon as we entered the government, we started working on the winter plan,” she said.
Source: LUSA
