Postponed surgeries and outpatient consultations in hospitals in the Algarve and constraints in primary health care units are consequences of the 3 day strike called by the Independent Doctors Union (SIM) that begins today.
SIM's Algarve regional secretary, João Dias, said that adherence to the strike is "quite high", around 93.5%, meaning “many of these patients have been waiting three or four months for an appointment, or five or six months waiting for a surgery and now they return home, waiting for it to be rescheduled.”
“We are being pushed by the Government into a situation that we tried to avoid as much as possible. Increasingly, there is a lack of responsiveness in the operating theaters and consultations, because there are fewer people, and I don't know where this will end. But the Government is not managing to solve the problem in this way”, he underlined.
According to João Dias, the operating rooms at the Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Algarve (CHUA), which includes the hospitals in Faro, Portimão and Lagos, are operating with the minimum services and all surgeries that are not considered urgent are being postponed.
According to the SIM union leader, doctors are being trained in public hospitals and then “leave for the private sector”, after being disppointed by the state of the SNS.
“The Algarve has to have enough capacity to respond to the population it serves, it cannot be in a situation where it does not have dermatologists, does not have haematologists, does not have endocrinologists and where the Orthopedics service is at the very least”, he stressed.
In addition to these specialties, Gynecology and Obstetrics also “is reduced to a third of the staff”, and Pediatrics, with two maternity hospitals operating, “practically five days a week, not to say six, there is no pediatrician in Portimão and, at other times, there is no pediatrician in Faro”, he said.
“We have patients waiting to be operated on in the Algarve, they cannot get an answer as to when it will be. Agreements are being made with hospitals such as Riba d'Ave in Braga to carry out surgeries, which is the farthest place in the country away from the Algarve, there was no place further away, only in Spain!”, he criticized.
According to João Dias, doctors are on strike "not only to have better conditions and attractiveness for professionals to remain in the National Health Service, but above all because they want the country to be able to respond".
This Tuesday, doctors started a three day national strike to force the Government to present a concrete proposal to revise the salary grid, which the Minister of Health promised on Monday to send to the unions.
This strike takes place simultaneously with a strike by family doctors for overtime work, which started on Monday and will last for a month.
Source https://postal.pt/
