At the end of the Council of Ministers meeting, the Minister of the Presidency announced the approval of “three resolutions authorizing expenditure to pay for three measures from the youth plan.”
The largest amount, 10 million euros between this year and the next, is intended to “support the free distribution of menstrual hygiene products in schools and health centers.” The minister argued that this is a “fundamental measure to combat menstrual poverty and the inequality of opportunities that affects many young people.”
For student accommodation, “about 7.5 million euros between 2024 and 2025 will be used to pay for beds arranged through protocols between higher education institutions and entities that provide various types of accommodation,” he also indicated.
The government also approved an expenditure of 7.9 million euros between this year and the next for the payment of health professionals under the “psychologist voucher and nutritionist voucher” measure.
The Council of Ministers also approved “two decree-laws that regulate clinical trials of medicines for human use, scientific research, and performance studies.”
“The idea is to expand, regulate, and create conditions for clinical trials in a safer, more protected way, but also to make them viable and beneficial for patients, while improving the context costs for health research and development activities in Portugal,” the minister stated.
The Council of Ministers’ communiqué indicates that a bill was approved “establishing new regulations aimed at creating a favorable framework for conducting clinical trials, in accordance with high standards of protection for the rights, safety, dignity, and well-being of clinical trial subjects for medicines for human use, as well as producing reliable and robust data and streamlining the evaluation of clinical trials.”
