Former Health Minister Adalberto Campos Fernandes defended this Friday that problems in the National Health Service (SNS) require the Prime Minister’s intervention, warning that the Executive Director and the Minister cannot solve the situation alone.
‘We are in a very difficult phase and it is not worth assuming that the director will do that [do SNS, Fernando Araújo] and the minister [Manuel Pizarro] just solve this problem”the doctor told journalists, on the sidelines of the Global Health Forum, which takes place this Friday and Saturday at the Estoril Congress Center.
The doctor warned that it was impossible to wait any longer and emphasized that this is an issue that goes beyond the two responsible parties because it is “a government problem.”
“It is an issue that addresses the Prime Minister because healthcare in Portugal cannot exist without a strong, coherent, dynamic, robust, quality SNS and it does not occur to anyone that the SNS can exist without doctors, without nurses and pharmacists who, within the limitations that the country has, obviously receive decent treatment and adequate remuneration’he declared.
Campos Fernandes recalled that at the beginning of this political cycle he held the Healthcare portfolio and recognized that even then the government had not solved the problem due to the lack of financial conditions from the state, and believed that “doctors were right” in their requirements.
According to him, a pact must be made between political forces, but he emphasized the importance of a pact between politics and professionals in these times.
For Campos Fernandes, “Fernando Araújo [que foi seu secretário de Estado] He’s the right person, but he can’t be the right person at the wrong time.”
“It would be dramatic for Portugal and the Portuguese if Professor Fernando Araújo saw his determination and his will destroyed only because politics, in the most macro sense of the word, does not understand reality”he warned.
When asked whether “it is the wrong time for Manuel Pizarro”, the former minister replied that Pizarro, like him, “He is a Minister of Medicine”.
“I am a doctor, the difference between us is that he is deeply political, he has a political career, and we all thought that this would help convince colleagues and even the head of government himself, but the issue here is not about with qualifications”, he emphasized.
For Campos Fernandes, “Manuel Pizarro runs the risk of becoming a victim of this whole process, because as a doctor he knows what doctors feel.”
“Today there is dissatisfaction expressed even in an inorganic way that could seriously endanger health care and the urgent response to the population, and this is too serious an issue for politicians not to look into it or deal with it with to push his stomach.” forward. There are responsibilities (…) that must be fully shouldered”he defended.
Asked about the figures presented by Manuel Pizarro during the event that the SNS this Friday has a record number of 150,000 professionals and a budget of more than 14,000 million euros, Campos Fernandes noted that “it is true, but it is an illusion”.
“We went from a budget of 9,000 million euros to 15,000 million without increasing the number of professionals and with consequences that we are now aware of: access restrictions, an increase in serious cases of oncological diseases and cardiovascular diseases”he claimed.
And he asked for “democratic humility” to evaluate this investment: “We can keep saying that we have never had so much investment and so much human resources, but we can run the risk that by saying that we will not have surgical emergencies in the country next week.”
Source: DN
