Adhesion in the order of 90%, both among nurses in hospitals in the Algarve and at the level of assistants, administrative staff, diagnostic technicians and senior technicians, throughout the region. These are the first numbers of the strike of the Algarve health professionals, which was supposed to be transversal to all professional classes, but which ended up not counting on doctors, that they will not have delivered the strike notice "in time".
In the middle of this morning, leaders of the unions of Portuguese Nurses, Workers in Public and Social Functions in the South and Autonomous Regions and the Union of Unions of the Algarve made a first assessment of the strike. At the door of the outpatient service of the Hospital de Faro, where “most of the consultations were canceled”, the unionists made a positive assessment of the strike.
“There has been very significant adherence by nurses. Most services are one hundred percent on strike. (…) The Hospital in Lagos is on strike one hundred percent, the one in Portimão this morning is close to 90 percent and the one in Faro in 80 percent», revealed the SEP/Algarve director Nuno Manjua.
“Right now, the Civil Service has a membership of 85 to 90 percent in the Algarve region. I'm talking about medical assistants, administrative technicians, radiology and senior technicians», revealed, on the other hand, union leader Rosa Franco. Numbers that are “higher” than usual when compared to other strikes.
The high level of adhesion motivated the closure of several services, despite the fact that minimum services were guaranteed, the union members assured. Most of the consultations and surgeries scheduled at the Centro Hospitalar do Algarve were canceled and there are several services that are not working in the different hospitals, for example, the Hospital de Dia de Faro.
At the level of Primary Health Care, there are health centers that are not functioning, such as São Brás de Alportel and services in which the adhesion of workers was one hundred per centre, such as the Continuous Care Unit of Moncarapacho, according to the first data that reached the Civil Service Union. But there are also others in which there was no adherence or the adherence was low, as in the case of several Family Health Units, which operate in the Health Centers, but in a self-managed model.
The protest aims to draw attention to the lack of human resources, which the unions estimate to be around 1100 professionals (official numbers point to 823) and to the lack of material, which undermines the quality of the service provided. Even because, in the workers' plenaries in which it was decided to move towards this strike, it was confirmed “a huge shortage of personnel, material shortages and new consequences of these failures”.
Photos by Bruno Filipe Pires/Algarve 123 and Hugo Rodrigues/Sul Informação
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