The approximately 1000 nurses who, in the two main hospitals in the Algarve – Portimão and Faro – provide services with individual employment contracts are on strike this Friday, demanding their integration in the civil service and a workday of 35 hours per week.
In Portimão, around a hundred nurses protested at the main door of the Hospital Center of the Barlavento Algarvio, holding banners, flags and shouting slogans.
Guadalupe Simões, leader of the Portuguese Nurses' Union, told journalists that these are "rights that are being withheld" from these professionals, since, as they have individual employment contracts, "they earn below the reference salary, with the aggravating factor working more hours, a total of 40 hours a week'.
It is, according to the union leader, an "inexplicable discrimination" and "exploitation of qualified labor".
At Hospital do Barlavento, in Portimão, the situation affects 420 nurses, while in Faro there are about 500 affected. In the case of Portimão, Guadalupe Simões guarantees that correcting the situation would cost the hospital 36 thousand euros a month, an amount that he considered "a drop of water" in the unit's expenses.
Furthermore, he underlined, there is the issue of working hours, with hired nurses working shifts of 13 hours, from 8:00 am to 21:00 pm. "What users should think about is how a nurse who works so many hours can maintain the same level of care, motivation and even security in the service he or she provides."
“The CA keeps nurses in this situation of discrimination but then makes pharaonic and millionaire contracts with other professional classes”, also denounced the SEP director.
Guadalupe Simões added that the situation could be corrected by the Boards of Directors of CHBA and HDF, "if they wanted to." "The Minister of Health said, in the Parliamentary Commission, that the Boards of Directors of these hospitals have financial management autonomy and can solve the problem."
Different opinion has the chairman of the Board of Directors of CHBA. Speaking to journalists, José Ramos assured: "we do not have the autonomy to make this decision."
The administrator added that this is "a national problem and not exclusive to this hospital", which results from the fact that there are two careers of nurses, one of professionals with individual employment contracts and the other of civil service employment contracts, "with salary scales many different".
"We asked the tutelage for a position on this framework, to find out whether, from a legal point of view, there are conditions for repositioning nurses or not, but the answer is that there is no legal support for this, because there is a missing component, which is a Collective Work Agreement of nursing with the Ministry of Health».
In other words, guarantees the chairman of the Board of CHBA, if the decision to increase the number of nurses were taken, “we would be incurring a criminal offense, which would fall on this management body”. Something that the CA does not want to happen, because, as José Ramos pointed out, "today we are criminally liable for decisions that do not have legal support".
This morning, in addition to the demonstration of the nurses on strike, at the entrance gate of the hospital in Portimão, there was another protest against paid parking, which was supposed to start this Friday, but will only start next Monday, April 8th.
In the end, the two demonstrations came together. "Basically, what we all want is health with better conditions for everyone," one of the nurses told the Sul Informação.
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