The Palliative Care Unit at the Hospital de Portimão, the only one in the region, will be closed as part of the ongoing restructuring, resulting from the creation of the Hospital Center of the Algarve, according to the report. Sul Informação.
In Portimão, since 2009, the only 10 palliative care beds existing at regional level have been operating, mainly for terminally ill patients. And the service has always worked well, with the head of Anesthesiology at the Barlaventino Hospital as the director.
But a few weeks ago, the direction of the Unit was changed, having been transferred to the responsibility of another anesthetist, from the Hospital de Faro.
Now, according to the Sul Informação Several sources of medical and nursing staff at the Hospital de Portimão, the Palliative Care Unit will even be closed. And this service will no longer be able to be provided in the Algarve, «in its own unit, with all the means and with specialized staff».
If this closure is confirmed, the guarantees several times given by the chairman of the Board of Directors from the Hospital Center of the Algarve (CHA) to the Sul Informação and in a statement, that no services would be terminated in Portimão, following the restructuring.
A hospital source even told our newspaper that “this Palliative Care Unit will be the same as what happened with the Convalescent Unit that existed in the Hospital de Faro, and that Dr. Pedro Nunes closed when he was just director of the Faro».
But, added the same source, «for the Convalescent Unit, it is even possible to consider that there are alternatives in the Algarve, but for the Palliative Care Unit, there are not!».
From sources contacted by Sul Informação, only the doctor Luís Batalau, who was already chairman of the Board of Directors of the extinct Centro Hospitalar do Barlavento (Portimão), agreed to show his face. And he did it because he never had tongue-in-cheek, is retired and can no longer suffer reprisals. Because, the doctors and nurses we spoke with assured, the atmosphere inside the Hospital of Portimão is one of “fear and threats, some veiled, but others very concrete”.
«The Palliative Care Unit, even as it is the only one in the Algarve, is intended for terminally ill patients, but it also has other important functions. A patient, oncological or not, dependent, can stay there for a few days while their caregiver rests, so they can then go back to taking care of the patient at home», explains Luis Batalau, who was responsible for the Hospital do Barlavento Algarvio when the unit was opened.
It is a service “directly linked to continuing care units. To get there, the patients go through a sieve, a series of assessments, and only then are they hospitalized».
Luís Batalau says he doesn't understand where closing the Palliative Care Unit will help to save money, as the CHA president's objective seems to be. “It works with normal, specialized nurses, it is true, but who belong to the hospital and earn as much as the others. It had a director, who was also responsible for Anesthesiology, as well as two other anesthesiologists at the hospital, and operational assistants at the institution itself. Where did this spend the most money for the Hospital?”, guarantees Luís Batalau.
«Closing this Unit, for the most unique in the Algarve, is inconceivable», said a nurse who also does not want to be identified. “The users of this Unit are mostly people at the end of their lives. There is no minimum of respect! It is necessary to give dignity to people, even in death,” added the same source, annoyed.
“One of the things that the chairman of the Board of Directors [Pedro Nunes] has already done is go upstairs, where there was a living room to be used by users and their families, and say that he is going to destroy everything to make wards. But this was an exclusive space for those people, a space where end-of-life decisions were often made, where privacy, more than necessary, is essential. This is called quality of care, this is called dignity!”, said the nurse contacted by Sul Informação.
The same source is also strange that, just four years after it started operating, a useful and well functioning service is now dismantled. Furthermore, “this Unit was created with money from the Continued Care Network, with European funding, and now everything will be destroyed”.
«What Dr. Pedro Nunes does not seem to realize is that Palliative Care is highly dependent on permanent nursing care, with medical support whenever necessary. And this type of care can only be provided in a hospital context. People can only be there for a few hours, but during those hours our obligation is to guarantee them the best quality of care possible, so that they have a dignified end of life».
To protest against this and other cuts that have been made in a "more or less hidden way, the dropper, even if they later say the opposite in the media and deny what is happening", it is being organized another protest for next Saturday, on the 5th, at 14 pm, next to the entrance to the Hospital de Portimão.
But "there are employees who are afraid to participate, for fear of being harmed later, in some way," added a hospital source.
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