The Minister of Health visits INEM today, six days after the contingency measures to minimize delays in responding to the population, a matter that should also lead Ana Paula Martins to give explanations in parliament.
Ana Paula Martins' visit to the headquarters of the National Institute of Medical Emergency (INEM), in Lisbon, is scheduled for 15:30 pm, but before that the minister will be heard in the Assembly of the Republic on the State Budget proposal for 2025.
Although this joint hearing in the Health and Budget, Finance and Public Administration committees is about the budget proposal for next year, Ana Paula Martins will have to face the delays recorded on the 112 line and in the activation of emergency services.
After at least 10 deaths were allegedly related to failures in the INEM response, several investigations were opened and several opposition parties directly called for the resignation of the Minister of Health, while others challenged the Prime Minister to assess whether Ana Paula Martins is fit to remain in office.
In his response, Luís Montenegro considered that the difficulties at INEM cannot be resolved with the resignation of Ana Paula Martins, claiming that the political consequence to be drawn is to resolve the institute's problems.
The PS bench has also asked that the president of the institute that coordinates the Integrated Medical Emergency System (SIEM), Sérgio Janeiro, be heard by the Health Committee urgently, alleging the need to “ascertain responsibility for the collapse” of the system, a request that will be voted on this afternoon.
The lack of resources at INEM, including pre-hospital emergency technicians (TEPH), has been recurrent in recent years, but became more evident on November 04, when 46 emergency services stopped during the morning shift and 44 during the afternoon shift, in addition to the delay in answering calls at the Urgent Patient Guidance Center (CODU).
This situation was due to the public service strike that took place that day, but also to the TEPH strike against overtime, which was, however, cancelled after an emergency meeting on Thursday between the Ministry of Health and the union.
On the eve of the strike suspension, the INEM board of directors was forced to implement several contingency measures to improve the functioning of its CODUs, such as the creation of a triage flow for calls with waiting times of more than three minutes, the integration of nurses into the CODUs and the review of procedures for passing data to teams in the field.
Over the weekend, the institute confirmed that average service times were, on average, 20 seconds of waiting, as a result of the measures implemented the previous week.
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