Health Minister Manuel Pizarro guaranteed today that he will present a proposal to revise the salary scale for doctors and regretted the "excessive criticism" that there has been about the way in which the negotiations have been carried out.
“Obviously we are going to send the salary grid proposal”, Manuel Pizarro told journalists, at the end of a visit to the requalification works of the health center in Seia.
A strike called by the Independent Physicians Union (SIM) will take place between Tuesday and Thursday with the aim of forcing the Government to present a concrete proposal to revise the salary grid, within the scope of the negotiations that started in 2022, but which did not result in an agreement between the parties.
According to the official, "negotiations have taken place in an environment of great frankness between both parties and before there is a written paper it is very useful to understand which are the borders that each of the parties wants to see enshrined".
“My main concern is to guarantee the improvement of services to the Portuguese. This is what has to be at stake”, he stressed, recalling that a new negotiation meeting is scheduled for next Friday.
The Minister of Health admitted that "there is no SNS (National Health Service) without health professionals", but underlined that "services to the Portuguese must be at the center of the concern of a government official".
“I have a lot of respect for union decisions to go on strike, but I think we are in a phase of national life in which we have to focus on helping to solve the problems of life for the Portuguese, namely issues related to access to health and it is this sign that I want to give here”, he said.
Manuel Pizarro was speaking to journalists at the door of the health center that is being refurbished, a work that will be ready at the end of 2024, as part of an investment of two million euros financed by the PRR.
“The fact that we are here in a health center allows us to say that, in relation to primary care doctors, we have already announced the fulfillment of what is their most significant claim, which is the generalization of Family Health Units with remuneration associated with performance”, he stressed.
Asked about the many Portuguese people who may not see their family doctor due to the strike, the government official explained that primary health care is “relatively little dependent on overtime”.
“Overtime in the National Health Service is, essentially, used in hospital emergency services, covered by the minimum services that doctors have never been exempt from fulfilling, depending on what is their ethical and deontological commitment that I want to praise”, he stressed.
The minister admitted that there may be “disturbances that may be undesirable”, but declined to anticipate “things that have not yet happened and that may still be resolved in another way”.
Doctors start the three-day national strike on Tuesday, but the stoppages in the health sector will continue in the coming weeks, also extending to pharmacists and nurses.
With regard to pharmacists, Manuel Pizarro recalled that, in recent years, there have been “at least two changes that have to be recognized”: the creation of the SNS hospital pharmacist career, in 2017, and the beginning of the first pharmaceutical residency in public hospitals, in January of this year.
“I think it is clear that it is a step forward, it is also clear that there are problems to be solved that need dialogue between the Ministry of Health and pharmacists and this dialogue will take place”, he assured.
In the case of nurses, "at the end of 2022, the Government reached an agreement with the majority of nurses' unions to enhance the professional career of nurses", leading to more than 18 nurses having already been "repositioned in their careers, with the increase in remuneration paid with retractions in January 2022".
“There is still work to be done in terms of the nursing career, but it is a career in which there has been a very significant advance that I think most nurses recognize”, he considered.
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