Miguel Freitas, deputy to the Assembly of the Republic, elected by the Socialist Party, went, at his request, to the Group of Health Centers (ACES) of the Central Algarve to find out about the current status of the provision of primary health care in that country. it is the ACES that covers more than half of the users in the Algarve Region.
Accompanied by António Eusébio, president of the PS Algarve Federation, Miguel Freitas went to the Health Center of Faro where he was received by the president of ARS Algarve João Moura Reis and by the executive director of ACES, José Carlos Queimado, to whom he had the opportunity to express his concern with the evolution of healthcare provided there and particularly with the shortage of professionals in the medical area in the health units covered.
“We learned that the shortage of doctors felt in the Algarve has been worsening in recent months, with the departure of professionals due to retirement or termination of contract and because of their non-replacement”, said the Socialist deputy.
Like the Sul Informação reported, in the Algarve, there are 139.116 users without a family doctor, which corresponds to 31,1% of the total, according to data from last December from the Regional Health Administration of the Algarve.
Miguel Freitas also said that he expressed “to the president of ARS Algarve his great concern about this decrease in accessibility to primary health care by the Algarve population, particularly at a time of great economic and social difficulties and with impacts already detected on people's health”.
“Despite these shortcomings, we note the progress made with the Family Health Units, a model created by the PS Government and which should be extended beyond the nine existing units”, concludes Miguel Freitas.
Along with these concerns, the president of PS Algarve questioned the president of ARS Algarve about “the situation in which the SUBs of Albufeira and Loulé find themselves, since they would supposedly be managed by the Centro Hospitalar do Algarve, but as far as we know , there is no coordination or assumption of management of these by the Hospital Center and there is a lack of clinical material for their functioning”.
“I received assurances from the president of the ARS Algarve that these situations were being taken care of, but what is certain is that they are a worrying diagnosis of health in the Algarve and the little relevance that this Government attributes to the issues that every day make the lives of populations fragile and , in this case, from the Algarve”, concluded António Eusébio.
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