The health minister, who stepped down on Tuesday, has seen her popularity rise as she fights the pandemic, but her relationship with health professionals has been marked by tensions that began shortly after she took office.
Shortly after taking office, in October 2018, to replace Adalberto Campos Fernandes in office, Marta Temido was faced with a strike by nurses demanding the valorisation of their careers and leading to the cancellation of thousands of planned surgeries in the main hospitals of the country.
At the time, Marta Temido classified the strike as “cruel”, claiming it was “against the weakest”, seeing users delay their planned operations.
A few months later, in February 2019, nurses were again paralyzed in a second ‘surgical strike’, leading to the postponement of more than 1,600 surgeries, including some scheduled under minimum shifts, according to the government.
In fact, this struggle led the government to declare in early February 2019 a civil claim against the nurses’ strike in operating rooms that had been going on for several weeks for non-compliance with the minimum services set for operations.
In fact, with regard to the Ordem dos Enfermeiros, institutional relations were broken and Marta Temido finally asked the Order for an investigation, initiated by the General Inspectorate of Health Activities.
The following year, in March 2020, the first cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in Portugal and since then the Ministry of Health has played a leading role in the fight against the pandemic, which catapulted Marta Temido to a level of unusual fame. in holders of this folder.
Sharing this familiarity with the Director-General of Health, Graça Freitas, and with the coordinator of the vaccination task force, the military Gouveia e Melo, Marta Temido had to deal with six pandemic waves, which, according to several organizations in the sector highlighted the weaknesses of the National Health Service (SNS) in terms of lack of human resources and working conditions.
During the first two years of the pandemic, which allowed Portugal to be a world example in terms of vaccination coverage against Covid-19, tensions with health worker representatives, who accused the minister of lack of dialogue during the pandemic, were latent. but have recently come up again.
Trade unions and industry associations have demanded structural measures from Marta Temido’s ministry to strengthen the SNS, alleging that the lack of working and salary conditions has led to a “bleeding” of doctors and nurses, who are working in the private sector and in emigration the attraction that public hospitals and health centers lack.
If Marta Temido, on the one hand, had a quiet summer in terms of Covid-19, with numbers falling steadily since the sixth wave, on the other hand, she struggled with hospitals’ difficulties in organizing full-scale specialists, which has forced the closure or conditioned operation of emergency obstetric services and delivery rooms.
The situation even led the government to set up the Emergency Surveillance Commission in Gynecology/Obstetrics and Childbirth Block, coordinated by doctor Diogo Ayres de Campos, but problems have persisted in several hospitals in recent weeks.
To respond to the difficulties faced by the SNS, the government approved the new SNS statute on July 7, which, according to Marta Temido, provides greater organizational and operational autonomy and greater motivation for professionals in the sector.
This new statute, currently being regulated and which will replace the current statute in force since 1993, allows the government to implement its policies to respond to the “problems faced by the Portuguese in their day-to-day, in contact with the SNS,” Marta Temido underlined, but industry associations claimed reforms are not done on paper.
One of the novelties envisaged by the statute is the establishment of an executive directorate for the SNS to coordinate the entire outreach by the SNS, as the government recognizes that there is an organizational deficit in the provision of health services to users.
Also, trade unions and the Ordem dos Médicos have recently contested the Ministry’s intention, foreseen in the state budget, to hire non-specialist clinicians to fill the shortage of general practitioners, despite the fact that Marta Temido had assured that these doctors were not count towards the coverage ratios. and family medicine.
According to the minister, about 1.4 million people do not have a GP, an increase that she attributes, among other things, to the growth in the number of SNS subscribers in recent years.
Marta Temido has tendered her resignation in the midst of a negotiation process with the unions, a few days away from starting a new phase of vaccination against Covid-19, as the SNS is restoring consultations, screenings and surgeries disrupted by the pandemic. damaged. and with approximately EUR 1.3 billion from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) in investments to strengthen several areas of public health services in Portugal.
Source: DN
