Health Minister Manuel Pizarro said this Wednesday that it is “absolutely undesirable” to use private services, but admitted that in some cases it should even be done to alleviate emergency situations in hospitals.
“The ultimate use of private services, the acquisition of private services, is absolutely undesirable in this context and that is why it is called a resource. In fact, it is a measure of attractiveness, but in some cases it may even have to be.”said Manuel Pizarro in response to a question from left bloc deputy Joana Mortágua at the regimental hearing at the Health Commission, where the minister will be heard this Wednesday.
In her speech, Joana Mortágua asked the minister if “will finally choose the ideological option, which even the PSD did not have the courage to do during the ‘troika’, namely to move towards privatized primary health care”namely with the creation of the USF Model C.
The minister reiterated that one should try to avoid this source and illustrated that if 80 or 90 hospitalizations are needed at the Garcia de Orta hospital in Almada to alleviate the urgency, he sees no other alternative.
“If we need [de lugares de internamento] today, this week, for next week I see no alternative but to find partners to help us solve the issue within this horizon”he underlined.
The minister stressed that “it is better not to do it”, warned that “worse is worse to leave people unattended”.
“Besides, for some reason during all this time no socialist government has regulated the USF Model C, because we only admit that we regulate it and we can only implement it in a supplementary, temporary, temporary, locally enacted way”supported Manuel Pizarro.
Asked by deputies about emergency room overcrowding situations, the minister said there were more than 80 emergency rooms operating in the country at around 11am on Wednesday.
“I am very concerned that three, four or five emergencies will have serious problems, but I cannot escape the fact that this means that there are 80 and such emergency departments operating normally at any given time”he said, pointing out that he’s not putting the issue into perspective.
The minister stressed that it is the health ministry’s concern to focus its action on emergency situations that are “difficult” to work with and understand why they are in that situation.
“The situation in every hospital is not exactly the same, although I understand that the plan we have presented responds to the main determinants, which must then be evaluated locally and at any time, because the situation is not the same every day”said Manuel Pizarro.
Joana Mortágua indicated that this Wednesday morning, the average waiting time for patients with a yellow wristband (urgent) at Hospital de Santa Maria was nine hours and 30 minutes, meaning that “the problem has not been resolved in recent days”.
In a response, the Minister of Health acknowledged that the situation was more difficult on Wednesday morning than Tuesday morning. “We’re doing relatively well to this day.”
He also noted that a long weekend was approaching, which “will require more intervention”, but said he was confident they could handle the situation.
“I am not putting the problem into perspective, but I think we are taking the measures that are possible to reduce the throughput in the emergency room, looking for other points of contact in the health system”he claimed.
He recommended that the first use of health services should be through SNS 24, followed by primary health care, and recalled that there will be teams in the inpatient units for the elderly, as well as the use of these teams for telemedicine.
The minister acknowledged that this reduces the problem of calamities, but does not solve them.
Source: DN
