The Emergency Department of Gynecology/Obstetrics at the Portimão Hospital Unit will close between 21:00 pm today, the 14th, and 9:00 am on the 20th, that is, next Monday, the Board of Directors of the Hospital Center has just announced University of the Algarve (CHUA).
This closure, explains CHUA, is due to «the difficulty in ensuring stopovers at the Maternity and Birth Center in Portimão».
CHUA says that “a coordinated assistance response will now be reorganized between its two hospital units [Portimão and Faro], thus guaranteeing the quality and safety of services provided at regional level'.
In this sense, while the emergency is closed, «the regional assistance response of CHUA in these specialties is guaranteed in the Hospital Unit of Faro by the team of experts Faro, which will be reinforced with doctors from the Portimão Hospital Unit».
The CHUA Board of Directors guarantees that “all other services and assistance areas are fully functioning”.
After the wave of closures of the Obstetrics Services of hospitals across the country, it is now time for the Algarve to suffer the same problem. The closure of the Portimão hospital was announced on the same day that the Minister of Health announced that she will proceed with a short-term contingency plan to alleviate problems in the hospitals' gynecology-obstetrics emergency services in the months of July to September. This plan involves the hiring of new specialists and the «more articulated, anticipated and organized operation of network emergencies».
Marta Temido, without giving details or specifying the solutions that could be advanced, added that she had another medium-term plan to tackle “structural” issues.
These statements by the Minister of Health followed a marathon of meetings that the minister held with officials from hospitals, the Medical Association and the sector's unions, after three days of closures and transfer of gynecology-obstetrics emergency patients from several hospitals.
The problems in the Obstetrics Emergencies have been happening in recent days: at the Almada hospital, in São Francisco Xavier (Lisbon), in Caldas da Rainha, Barreiro, Setúbal and Santarém, in Amadora-Sintra, in Loures, BRaga, Guarda , Vila Franca de Xira. And now also Portimão.
Despite the optimism expressed by the President of the Republic, who stated that he was convinced that this problem will be resolved before the summer, the prospects are precisely in the opposite direction.
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