Between holidays and weekends, Guarda Hospital’s emergency department will be without internal medicine specialists due to doctors’ inability to work overtime.
The duty schedules for these days do not currently include the presence of any doctor in this specialty, as a source in the local Guarda Medical Unit (ULS) confirmed to Lusa.
A group of doctors have introduced a draft ban on overtime work since October, and deficiencies in service schedules are starting to be noticed.
Late last week, the administration of ULS da Guarda warned that the service would operate 24 hours a day, but would take holidays and weekends into account.
ULS asked the public to “be more understanding and, where possible, utilize the services provided by community health centers.”
Emergency Services Director Adelaide Campos confirmed to Lusa that the schedules for October were incomplete due to a group of doctors saying they were not willing to work overtime given that they had already reached capacity. limit Annually.
“There will be days when teams will not be able to form, because there are not enough specialists in each of the teams, and therefore the emergency department may have to be closed,” the director of the Ministry of Emergency Situations warned.
Adelaide Campos expressed hope that “the Minister of Health and CEO of SNS [Serviço Nacional de Saúde] understand what may happen in the coming weeks.”
The director emphasized that the overtime limit had long been reached and “this situation cannot continue.”
“We cannot have a region of 160,000 people without a hospital that receives emergency patients. This is not viable, it is impossible,” he warned.
In September, a group of specialists sent an open letter to the health minister with more than 1,000 signatures from doctors warning of their inability to work overtime.
Since then, according to the Doctors in Struggle movement, the unavailability of doctors has caused “problems with emergency care scheduling” in at least 21 hospitals, including Viana do Castelo, García da Orta, Bragança, Barreiro , Guarda, Viseu, Santarem. , Braga, Matosinhos, Leiria, Aveiro, Caldas and Torres Vedras, Portimão and Santa Maria Hospital.
The National Federation of Doctors (FNAM) has planned a national demonstration for October 17 in front of the Ministry of Health.