The president of the Portuguese Medical Association said today that he is not satisfied with the normalization of the inability of the National Health Service (SNS) to respond every year to the pressure on hospital emergency rooms during flu seasons.
“I’m not satisfied that every year political leaders, such as the Minister of Health himself or the executive director of the SNS, see this situation as normal,” lamented Carlos Cortes, who was speaking to journalists in Coimbra at the end of the reception for medical interns.
Considering what is happening in most national hospitals to be unacceptable, with long waiting times and patients on firefighters’ stretchers, the leader said that there must be preparation to avoid situations that “happen recurrently”.
“Every year we have winter, every year there are respiratory infections and every year there is pressure on the health services and what happens every year, unfortunately, is that there is no concrete plan capable of reversing this fatality that has befallen the SNS,” he criticized.
Faced with this, the president of the Portuguese Medical Association (OM) doesn’t understand “how political leaders can come to this point and see the situation as surprising and normal”.
Carlos Cortes insists that he doesn’t “think it’s normal” that “there is pressure on emergency rooms, that doctors and other health professionals are exhausted and that the SNS can’t respond”.
He advocates an “adequate response, which must be prepared for next year, without waiting for things to happen and the system to stop responding before starting to introduce solutions such as extending the hours of health centers”.
“This formula is insufficient, it has already been used in other years and has shown its insufficiency, and what is currently happening [in hospital units] was to be expected,” he said.
The OM president stressed that immediate and short and medium-term solutions must be found, which include “reforming primary health care, attracting more doctors to the SNS and using the capacity of the private and social sectors, which is already being used for scheduled surgeries”.
For Carlos Cortes, the pressure on hospital emergency rooms is not a matter of “fatality” and is the result of “irresponsibility and sometimes incompetence in terms of the inability to plan for these situations”.
