The Hospital Center of the Algarve has 238 fewer nurses than it should and the shortage of these health professionals, in all the public units in the region, exceeds 350. The complaint was made this Friday by the Union of Portuguese Nurses, which considers that the This situation, transversal to the country's hospitals and health centers, may jeopardize the “safety and quality” of the National Health Service.
“The quality and safety of care, in many services, is questionable. This is due to Government measures and people must be aware of this. They must denounce, organize to protest and demonstrate», defended the president of the SEP José Carlos Martins, at a press conference convened by that union, which took place in Faro. Even so, he stressed, the National Health Service "still guarantees high levels of response to people."
The meeting with the media aimed to report on a survey of the current needs of the Hospital Center of the Algarve, which was based on official government reports. The shortage of nurses in the three hospitals in the Algarve, despite being far from being unique, "is at the top" of the most serious nationwide.
The lack of nurses in the region and in the country determines that most services are under-staffed with nurses, which leads to great pressure on professionals, who are not always arrive for all orders. This leads to “increased risk of hospital infections and errors” due to overtime work, combined with more obligations.
“Because we have few nurses per shift, we are back in the 80s and we have services with only one nurse. (…) We have operating theaters that, instead of the three nurses that the law and good practices determine, only work with two», illustrated José Carlos Martins, who is in the Algarve as part of the campaign «Our work is your right, demand more nurses».
This reality is causing, according to the union, "a wave of discontent and lack of motivation among professionals, which has led to the departure for the private sector, abroad or even the abandonment of the profession".
In the pipeline, will be the hiring of 45 new nurses for public health units in the Algarve, numbers that the regional leader of the SEP Nuno Manjua considers insufficient and that will serve "largely to compensate for the outputs".
Union leaders demand that the situation be corrected and more nurses hired, in sufficient numbers, because they say it is "a contradiction" to have "so many nurses unemployed or emigrating", when the country's needs are so high.
According to the SEP, in all public health services in the country, including continuing, palliative and home care, the lack of nurses reaches "25 or 26 thousand".
The SEP has already met with the new Regional Health Administration of the Algarve, which informed that it would be carrying out "a needs assessment", according to Nuno Manjua. “The problem is that each administration, when it enters, says it will carry out a survey, but it never reaches the competitions to suppress the needs”, he lamented.
In addition to the lack of human resources, nurses denounced recurrent shortages of material and guarantee that families have already been asked to provide it.
At issue are "diapers, needles, syringes, pads and adhesives", among other material that is used daily. "In the last round we made in hospitals, this week, the situation had improved a little, but it has been happening," guaranteed Nuno Manjua.
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