O PSD wants to hear from the Executive Director of the National Health Service and the Portuguese Association of Hospital Administrators (APAH) about the increase in social hospital admissionsa request that will be voted on this Wednesday in the parliamentary health committee.
The aim, the Social Democrats explain in the application, is “to obtain more detailed information on the 7th Barometer of Social Internments”, released last Friday.
According to this report in total 1,675 beds in public hospitals were occupied in March by people hospitalized solely for social reasons, a 60% increase in inappropriate hospitalizations that could have a financial impact of €226 million for the state this year.
“The PSD is deeply concerned about this reality which, despite being deplorable and inhumane for thousands of patients – particularly the oldest and most frail – clearly highlights the Government’s inability to devise a consistent strategy and to implement that offers a solution to, or at least, structurally reduce this very serious social problem’, criticize the social-democratic delegates.
The PSD states that the number of people in this situation in 2022 (1,048) already represented a 23% increase from the 853 who were wrongfully hospitalized in 2021 according to the APAH.
“This means that between 2021 and 2023, the number of people wrongfully hospitalized in SNS hospitals will almost double,” they emphasize.
On the other hand, the PSD believes that the data now released contradicts “head-on the information of the Ministry of Health according to which, by the end of January 2023, 665 would be wrongly admitted to hospitals of SNS, that is, about a thousand less than just two months later, according to figures now revealed by APAH”.
That being said, the Social Democratic parliamentary group requested to hear the Portuguese association of hospital administrators and the executive director of the SNS, Fernando Araújo, “with a view to evaluating the implementation of measures to reduce so-called ‘social hospital admissions'” in the hospitals of the National Health Service”.
Source: DN
