The Algarve’s regional health authority has signed a deal with its counterpart across the border in Andalucía in a continuing attempt to attract Spanish doctors to work in the region.
The partnership aims to “strengthen the exchange in health care and the sharing of human resources between the two neighboring regions.”
The president of the Algarve’s health service, João Moura Reis, accompanied by colleagues Nuno Ramos and Tiago Botelho, went to Seville to meet the director general of the Andalucía Health Service, José Manuel Aranda Lara, and with the director general of the Spainsh health assistance board, Juan Tomás García Martínez.
The meeting was set up to develop cross-border links and "to create an institutional partnership for training, research and the all-important exchange of human resources in primary and hospital health care."
One of the major goals of this partnership is to attract more doctors to the Algarve than those in the Algarve wishing to move to Spain. It was not explained how this will come about as no quota system was released nor any projections as to the net flow of Doctors to the Algarve when salaries are significantly lower than in Portugal and, for the Algarve, accommodation costs are notably higher.
In September last year, José Manuel Silva from Portugal's medical council said of the previous Algarve hospital group’s manager Dr Pedro Nunes that he had “mismanaged human resources and has failed to replace doctors who have left the hospital, leaving colleagues in an overloaded state, with "shifts of one or two doctors, when there should be four.”
Silva refused to agree that doctors did not want to work in the Algarve, that none respond to job ads, and that many are going from the public to the private sector, or going to work abroad - despite this being evident.
With nationally agreed pay rates for Portugal’s doctors, the Algarve is relegated to a 'lifestyle option' when salaries are higher elsewhere and living costs in the region are high. So it ever was and in March this year the Health Ministry announced a range of incentives for doctors willing to relocate to the region.
The Ministry was looking at school transfer help for doctors’ children, the preferential treatment for spouses looking for work transfers, and an increase of two days holiday as well as cash incentives.
In April 2016, MP Cristóvão Norte spotted that cuts in the regional healthcare budget will make it unlikely that any more doctors can be hired for the Algarve’s understaffed hospitals and clinics.
The Algarve MP intervened during a parliamentary debate involving the Minister of Health, arguing that "the attention and priority that the minister has devoted to the Algarve, although well received, have no budgetary translation, which makes it impossible for such measures to be achieves unless the Government undertake budgetary changes that undo the cuts that the National Health Service has suffered this year in the Algarve."
One of the human resource problems for the region is the huge summertime increase in potential patients as the Algarve fills up with holidaymakers and second home owners.
Whether an agreement with Andalucía will go any way to resolving these age-old issues remains to be seen, but the potential now exists for Portugal-based doctors to work in Spain under the new bi-lateral agreement.
