The Secretary of State for Health today announced several measures for the health condition of Health in the Algarve will begin to show improvements in the summer. In June, 30 family doctors will arrive in the region to be placed in the ACES Barlavento and Central and, in addition, new solutions were presented to fill the shortage of clinicians and nurses at the Hospital Center of the Algarve.
Manuel Delgado is visiting the Algarve this Tuesday and during his visit to Faro, revealed "exceptional solutions that can help to solve the problem [of the shortage of doctors]".
The possibility that patients at the Centro Hospitalar do Algarve could be treated in hospitals in Lisbon was already known, but this protocol could go further. «Another solution to be discussed by the CHA administration is the possibility of coming teams of doctors from Lisbon to the Algarve. Since we cannot quickly hire people and there are no available on the market, there is the possibility that teams of surgeons and anesthetists from Lisbon come to the Algarve, at certain times of the week, who can, for two or three days, operate on scheduled patients. waiting” for treatment.
Ultimately, Manuel Delgado said that there is also the possibility that "some patients can be operated on in a private environment, as long as they are available and correspond to the quality we want."
If these are short-term measures, Manuel Delgado also announced measures to resolve the problem of lack of doctors once and for all: «we are going to open competitions that create conditions for doctors who are in metropolitan areas to be able to choose to come to the Algarve. We cannot put a knife to their chest to force them to come here, but we will try to create incentives that positively discriminate these options».
These incentives will be monetary and career. «If a doctor chooses to come to the Algarve, it can happen that he will earn more than in Lisbon at the same level of the profession. On the other hand, there is also support that municipalities can provide in terms of housing, accommodation and then there can also be career incentives: a doctor who is in a needy area will be able to progress more quickly in his professional career», he revealed.
According to Manuel Delgado, the «Government and the Ministry of Health, in particular, have their focus concentrated on the Algarve. It is a region of the country that lacks human resources in Health. And it is a gateway for many visitors who annually seek us out. We know that the tourist flow this year will beat the records of previous years and, for these reasons, it is a priority intervention area».
The Secretary of State says that these measures try to "introduce a positive dynamic in the capture of human resources and will begin to bear fruit as of June", with the arrival of the 3rd new family doctors. "We know that there is a shortage in the Central and Barlavento regions and we know that we have to concentrate these 30 family doctors in these two areas," he said.
The constraints experienced in the Group of Health Centers (ACES) of the Central Algarve were, in fact, the subject of conversation between the secretary of state and the mayor of São Brás de Alportel and president of the ACES Central Community Council, Vitor Guerreiro during the visit of the governor to the Center for Medicine and Rehabilitation of the South.
In a meeting with Manuel Delgado, the mayor handed over a letter regarding the different constraints identified in the different functional units of this ACES, which include lack of human resources, lack of computer equipment and consumables, lack of maintenance and repair in buildings, repair and maintenance of vehicles, among others», as revealed by the City of São Brás.
Despite the news that he brought during his visit to the Algarve, the member of the Government stressed, however, that “it is not possible to solve all the problems in one day, not even at once. This process – once health services have been degraded due to disinvestment – takes time until the previous condition is recovered. It's a slow process and we don't want the neediest patients to wait forever. I say this because there are patients here in the region who have been waiting four years for a specialist consultation and, for surgery, a year or two».
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