Marta Temido, who resigned as health minister this morning, has had a professional career related to management in the sector, but it was the fight against the pandemic that has brought her fame in recent years.
The health minister has faced several controversies, especially the one who took office five months ago. Recently, there has been much criticism of the closure of emergency obstetric services in several hospitals due to the lack of doctors to fill the scales, as well as serious problems in transporting pregnant women.
The ministry was now in talks with doctors’ unions about compensation for emergency room clinicians.
The health minister, who was renewed in office last March when the new executive took office, joined the government in October 2018, following the departure of Adalberto Campos Fernandes.
A year later – in October 2019 – Marta Alexandra Fartura Braga Temido de Almeida Simões again earned the trust of António Costa and a few months later became one of the most famous “faces” of the Portuguese due to the covid-19 pandemic. who arrived in Portugal in early 2020.
Since then, the fight against Covid-19 has dominated the work of the Ministry of Marta Temido, born in Coimbra, where she was born in 1974, with various organizations in the sector, such as professional associations and trade unions, criticizing the chronic lack of National Health Service (SNS) emerges from the pandemic, which reached the ‘peak’ of hospitalizations and deaths in early 2021.
Sharing the leadership role with the Director-General of Health, Graça Freitas, and with the former coordinator of the ‘task force’ of vaccination, Gouveia e Melo, the Minister of Health has always guaranteed that the SNS was the target of more funding as well as health professionals.
In addition to the pandemic, Marta Temido’s governance was marked by the adoption by the Council of Ministers, in October 2021, of the new SNS statute, as provided for in the Basic Law on Health, published in 2019, and which, according to the government, will come clear the role and relationship between the different actors in the health system.
This new Statute provides for the creation of an Executive Directorate for the management of the SNS, an area not unknown to the Minister of Health, who holds a PhD in International Health, a Masters in Health Management and Economics and a Degree in Law.
Throughout her professional career, Marta Temido, who also specializes in Hospital Administration, has held various management positions at entities in the sector.
Before taking on government duties, she was Deputy Director of the Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Central Administration of the Health System, Non-Executive Chair of the Administration of the Hospital da Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa and board member of several public hospitals.
He was also chairman of the board of the Portuguese Association of Hospital Administrators.
But Marta Temida’s public visibility has recently expanded to party activities, with her affiliation with the Socialist Party, and even received her militant card from António Costa at the Congress held in Portimão in August 2021, a title he considered “an honour”. and also “a responsibility”.
In the elections of January 30, Marta Temido was elected deputy of the Assembly of the Republic for Coimbra, the district where she headed the PS list.
Among the immediate challenges is that the ministry needs to respond to the recovery of the relief activities for users harmed by the covid-19 pandemic and the approximately 1.3 billion euros of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), aimed at the strengthen the SNS in various areas, materialize.
Source: DN
