The maximum waiting time for an appointment with a consultant doctor in the Algarve’s national health service is set at 120 days.
The average currently is over a year with one instance of a patient waiting 856 days to be seen.
Management’s justification for these delays is “a lack of doctors” with an insistence that the service is ready and waiting for the heightened seasonal demand brought by the summer influx of tourists.
Staffing problems are nothing new in the health sector across Portugal but the Algarve’s seasonal increase on the region’s hospitals poses special, yet entirely predictable, problems.
As tourists start to fill the emergency service waiting rooms, long standing appointments for locals are kicked further down the road - for locals, it doesn’t pay to be ill during the summer months as the population swells from 450,000 to more than 1.5 million.
Jornal do Algarve looked at the maximum waiting times for NHS hospitals and found, unsurprisingly, that the published ‘Maximum Guaranteed Response Times’ for a first consultations in various specialties were being exceeded, the worst case being urology where patients are having to waiting an average of two years to be seen.
Despite frequent initiatives to attract additional doctors to the region, management has struggled and most vacancies remain exactly that.
The Ministry of Health this week launched a competition to attract 70 doctors from other areas of the country. The result has mirrored the response in previous years when, in 2017, only four doctors moved south, in 2016 the total was seven.
A swifter clearing system for doctors moving to Portugal has been resisted by the Medical Council and previous contracts for groups of doctors from, for example Cuba, saw excessive and politically embarrassing payments being made by the ministry to overseas health departments.
Pay and conditions for nurses, medical staff and doctors are significantly better in other European countries. Many decide to move in order to further their professional careers.
The trend is for those residents able to afford private health care, to sign up and avoid the queues.
Whether this is the result of a deliberate, if covert, government policy remains to be proven but reports now indicate that around a quarter of the resident population now goes private despite most having paid in to the public system through decades of work.
Portugal, like the UK, sticks to the same healthcare model and encounters the same problems, year after year while promising change.
Whether Brexit will see a decline in Britons accessing currently free healthcare services while on holiday, also remains to be seen. With the UK soon to be outside the EU, a solution to the 'sick Brits on holiday' scenario is just part of the multitude of post-Brexit arrangements that will need to be put in place for Portugal's government to be able to fulfill its intention to remain a trouble free destination for the valuable British tourist sector.
