The Hospital and University Center of the Algarve (CHUA) has fewer than 40 nurses since the beginning of February, but it remains without government authorization to hire the professionals needed to replace them, denounced the Portuguese Nurses Union.
In January, the chairman of the Board of Directors of CHUA Ana Paula Gonçalves assured the Sul Informação – and to the union – which had already been authorization was requested from the tutelage to integrate "54 nurses, to replace those who will transfer to primary health units", following the competition that was launched at national level.
These professionals they would join 42 other nurses, whose hiring "only waits for authorization from the guardianship", a contingent that will come to «fill the gaps» pointed out for a long time by the SEP, which has been warning of a chronic shortage of nurses in the Algarve's hospitals.
But, says the union, authorization is slow in coming. “The public assurances from the Ministry of Health that nurses would be replaced amount to zero. The SEP warned about the situation of nurses leaving and the consequences if they were not replaced, including the prime minister, in Faro, on the 12th of January, who received a document. In response to this interpellation, the Prime Minister replied "let's see..." and informed that he had sent the document to the Minister of Health», he recalled.
The delay in hiring nurses who, at least, replace those who have now left, is causing a set of constraints to the CHUA's work, guaranteed the SEP.
«The contingency plan was activated with an increase in beds in some services, opening of beds in the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Center of the South, but with fewer nurses. The CHUA is prevented from moving forward with projects at home with a guarantee of greater safety for patients because it does not have nurses,” according to the union.
«This position of the Ministry of Health begins to have the contours of a “sloppy” strategy to create obstacles to the passage of nurses to an Individual Employment Contract for 35 hours and, if it continues, the SEP will schedule a plenary session with nurses to decide forms of struggle», assured the unionists.
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