"As we promised, we will prepare an emergency program that will be presented by June 2nd", stated Luís Montenegro at the inauguration ceremony.

According to the Government Program, this plan prepared by a task force coordinated by physician Eurico Castro Alves will focus on recovering waiting lists for appointments, surgeries, and exams, on the response to maternal and child care, and on primary health care.

On that occasion, the head of the PSD/CDS-PP coalition executive also said that, in parallel with this plan, the "Government will not fail to implement a structural reform that strengthens and preserves" the National Health Service (SNS) as the basis of the system, but warned that the capacity installed in the social and private sectors should be used, "without useless ideological complexes".

The Program of the XXIV Government acknowledges that the diagnosis on the current state of Health in Portugal "is well done and documented by serious and reliable sources", and is "universally considered worrisome".

"The clinically recommended times for appointments and surgeries are often exceeded in several SNS hospitals", the document also states, emphasizing that the "consecutive degradation of working conditions" for health professionals has had "disastrous consequences for the organization" of services, with "particular severity" for emergencies.

In view of this, the emergency plan, according to the Government Program, aims to ensure that maximum response times are guaranteed for specialty appointments, surgeries, and complementary diagnostic and therapeutic means.

In addition, it focuses on "ensuring the emergency response in maternal and child health and aims to assign a family doctor to all Portuguese citizens, starting with the most vulnerable people".

According to the document, this is a plan that will be "presented in 60 days, which includes several measures to achieve these goals on a defined schedule, step by step, in 2024-2025".

The presentation of this plan comes at a time when changes are taking place in the Executive Board of the SNS (DE-SNS), an entity created by the previous Government to manage the network of assistance response to users, with the departure of Fernando Araújo, after about 15 months in office, and the appointment of a military doctor, António Gandra d'Almeida, to the position.

In addition to the changes in the coordinating team, it is expected that the DE-SNS, a body provided for in the new SNS Statute, will be reformulated, with a simpler structure.

The Government Program specifically provides for "restructuring the DE-SNS, with a change in its organizational structure -- more simplified --, and its functional powers, aiming at a less verticalized and more adequate governance to the complexity of health responses, articulation between care networks and contracting and financing models, infrastructures, human resources, and digital transformation in health".

The emergency plan is also presented after the unions of health professionals and the Government met to agree on the terms of the negotiations on careers, with the doctors rejecting, for now, signing the negotiation protocol, claiming that it does not provide for salary scales.

The union structures have warned that improving salary and working conditions is essential to retain and attract more doctors to the SNS, a constraint that is also aggravated by the high number of foreseeable retirements of clinicians.

In the activity report that it submitted to the Ministry of Health, the DE-SNS warns that about 5,000 SNS professionals are expected to retire this year, considering it "critical to attract" new specialists and doctors who work outside public units.

This year alone, the executive board estimates that 1,901 doctors, 699 nurses, 1,158 operational assistants, 171 senior diagnostic and therapeutic technicians, 794 technical assistants, 139 senior technicians, 37 pharmacists, and about 198 professionals from other areas may retire.

According to data from the Medical Association, 45% of the approximately 9,000 family doctors are over 65 years old and, according to the SNS transparency portal, 1,565,880 users do not have a general and family medicine specialist assigned to them, when in August 2019 there were about 644 thousand.

Official data indicate that, at the end of March, the SNS had about 21,400 medical specialists in its service, in addition to 11 thousand more interns, more than 50 thousand nurses, and 9,800 senior diagnostic and therapeutic technicians.

Leia Também: Livre pede para ouvir Marta Temido e Lacerda Sales no caso das gémeas (Portuguese version)