The situation is "undesirable" but, if there is an extreme situation, like what happened last weekend, in the incubators of the Hospital of Faro, there may be pregnant women being transferred to Évora, more than 200 kilometers from the Algarve.
Marta Temido, Minister of Health, was in the Algarve today, at a time when the state of hospitals in the region is the order of the day.
Em Faro, after having already been in Portimão, the government official spoke to journalists and began by explaining that the situation at the weekend (in which a 28-week-old pregnant woman had to be transferred from Portimão to Évora) was due “to the fact that the incubators were full and there was a childbirth that would eventually need this type of care».
This weekend, the 13th and 14th of July, and the next one on the 20th and 21st, will again be one of «possible difficulties» in the Maternity of Portimão. There will not be a "closure", but Marta Temido admitted the possibility of having "difficulties in the composition of the scales".
“We will not have support from a pediatric medical specialist today, tomorrow and Sunday. We will have a possible new difficulty next weekend. Ladies who need gynecology and obstetrics care will be referred to Faro and children who need emergency care from specialized pediatrics will be referred here to Faro too», said the minister.
What is certain is that an overcrowding of maternity hospitals in the Algarve could once again lead to pregnant women being transferred to Évora.
"There may be this situation, but we must also face the answers that the system has to give", justified Marta Temido.
Even so, the government official confessed that she was not "calm and satisfied with this situation."
“We are all making the greatest efforts. We have three service providers in Portimão and we need to reinforce this aspect. That is the line of activity we are working on», he said.
For the minister, “medium and long-term answers are needed and this is linked to the need to reorganize the medical work itself”.
And what measures could these be? Marta Temido said that taking advantage of the needy vacancies for General and Family Medicine, which opened in the Algarve and were not filled, could be a solution. The idea is to open these vacancies to the specialties of pediatrics and gynecology/obstetrics.
“One of the things we were working on this morning was taking advantage of these vacancies for the purposes of granting the needy incentive,” he said.
During the holidays, the Algarve will have, these days, a great “peak in the influx” of people, as the government official acknowledged. For everyone there will be «health care that matches». But the minister also hopes that not all tourists "are health care consumers"...
The prediction of Marta Temido is that, by the end of this month of July, everything will be «resolved». Until then, "these weekends will still be difficult periods," he concluded.
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