Nurses at the Emergency Department of Portimão deliver the Manifest to the Secretary of State for Health

A manifesto "for dignified working conditions and quality and safe health care" at the Hospital de Portimão, signed by nearly 50 of the 60 nurses from that unit's Emergency Department, was delivered this morning to the Secretary of State for Health, in Portimão .

In their two-page manifesto, the nursing team stresses that “we are few, too few to respond to so many people who pile up on stretchers side by side, to the point of touching, waiting long hours for care, an answer or a simple look».

“The poster posted on the wall, that someone has defined, reads that the maximum waiting time is 12 hours, but the reality is quite different. They are hospitalized in the emergency room for several days, sometimes up to a week, when in fact there shouldn't even be “inpatients” in the emergency room», they also denounce.

Nuno Manjua, from the Portuguese Nurses Union, explained to the Sul Informação that the document presents “a set of solutions to the problems experienced at the Hospital de Portimão, but which have to be aligned with other measures at the level of Primary Health Care”. "Upstream, there must be more nurses to help prevent the disease and to treat as much as possible, thus avoiding emergency visits to hospitals."

Nuno Manjua also defended that there has to be "another dynamic in the management of discharges and hospitalizations", so that, "after the acute situations are resolved, there are no "admissions" in the emergency room, waiting to know what to do with that patient" .

The head of the Union of Nurses in the Algarve added that the announced separation of hospitals from Faro and Portimão, with the end of the Algarve Hospital Center, "does not solve the problems, which existed before the CHA was created".

The union said this in a letter that should have been delivered today to the minister of health, who ended up not visiting the Algarve, being replaced by its secretary of state. In the letter, the Sul Informação had access, the SEP argues that «the split will not solve (by itself) the problem of the Emergency Department of the Hospital de Portimão, among others in this institution, since they already existed before the creation of the CHA».