The Order of Nurses warned this Saturday, January 6, that the statutes approved on Friday by parliament “may jeopardize the quality of healthcare provision”, asking that a new review of the law begin immediately.
«We regret that, despite the veto of the President of the Republic and our successive warnings about problems and errors, the diploma was approved without the changes that were required», said the President of the Order of Nurses Luís Filipe Barreira, in a statement today disclosed.
«There is no single reason that justifies this action. At some points, we are even making the quality of healthcare provision unfeasible, which is incomprehensible,” he warned.
According to Luís Filipe Barreira, the approved diploma calls into question the integrity of the provision of health care when “it allows the use or transfer of practices, techniques and skills specific to the profession to non-nursing professionals, or when it restricts the competence of nurses' prescription, with no provision being made for the profession's acts to be exclusive to nurses'.
According to the president, if “common sense prevails in the next legislature”, a new review of the law should be initiated immediately.
A review “that is not subject to political agendas, with the time and tranquility necessary to safeguard the autonomy of the Order, and, above all, adequate to protect the beneficiaries of the health care provided by nurses”, he defended.
The statutes of the Order of Nurses were approved on Friday by the socialist majority in parliament despite having been vetoed by the President in December.
The vote took place after the documents relating to the amendment of the statutes were reviewed, on Wednesday, in the Assembly of the Republic.
The diploma had already been approved by the PS in October, but Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa vetoed it after listening to the president, considering that “the desirable functional complementarity of health professions was not assured, and practices should be carried out in complementarity in the best interest of care recipients, without providing care in a compartmentalized manner».
In the statement released today, the nurses' president also states that the confirmation of the revision of the Order's statutes “puts into question the constitutionally foreseen autonomy of the institution”.
«The absence of technical bodies in the list of the Order's bodies is not understandable», he stated, adding that «these bodies have a significant importance in the evolution of the specialization of nursing care, as well as in the creation of specialty areas».
Furthermore, he added, the lack of technical bodies "not only causes negative discrimination by the Order of Nurses in relation to professional public associations in other areas of health, where those bodies are expressly provided for, but also hinders, in an unacceptable way, the evolution of the specialization in the provision of health care».
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