The president of the Liberal Initiative heard several complaints this Tuesday from users who had to wait for hours to be seen at the health center of Algueirão Mem-Martins, in Sintra, and defended the possibility of patients being able to use the private service without a doctor.
One of the testimonies Rui Rocha heard was that of Serafim dos Santos, 79, who told Lusa that he had been outside the health center in the parish of Algueirão Mem-Martins since about three in the morning.
“This happens every first working day of the month because in Sintra there are a lot of people who don’t have a GP – over 100,000 people in Sintra don’t have a GP – and here, in this health center, the only option to try and get an appointment is to come here on the first working day of the month”said Rui Rocha to journalists.
One of the complaints of the dozens of people waiting in line at the country’s largest health center, which has some 42,000 registered users, is the lack of shelter, or even a bathroom, as people fight against the building. are waiting.
“Today is a mild day, but this happens in winter, with sun, with rain, there’s no kind of cover, there’s no kind of protection for the people who are here and, as I said, it’s something that is systematically repeated.” This is simply unacceptable, we cannot consider this normal in Portugal in 2023,” Rui Rocha complained.
Elderly people lined up, as well as children and even babies, with a number of people sheltering from the sun – which was already hot at 8:45 am – with umbrellas.
Rui Rocha stressed that people end up resorting to emergency hospitals after being unable to access these services, pointing out that “there is data that says that almost half of hospital emergencies are not true emergencies”.
The IL leader recalled that the party has already proposed that, in the absence of the state’s capacity to provide a general practitioner, people could “recourse to private services”.
The leader also added that “the state is currently unable to attract many professionals” in the healthcare sector for two reasons.
“First, because there are a lot of structures – leadership, management structures – where people are placed based on party affiliation and not their competence, and this demotivates the teams, leaving the teams feeling unrecognized,” he said.
On the other hand, he continued, “there needs to be more competition in pay and compensation.”
“We need a civil service, doctors, teachers, a public service in general, organized according to objectives, their productivity and then with a clearly competitive remuneration in the market compared to what they deliver in their functions,” he defended.
The Algueirão Mem-Martins Health Center was inaugurated on April 25, 2021 by Prime Minister António Costa and represented an investment of about four million euros, according to the website of the municipality of Sintra.
Source: DN
