The Portuguese Union of Nurses (SEP) announced this Thursday a national strike on November 10, targeting the existing problems in the National Health Service (SNS) and demanding a solution from the Ministry of Health.
“We are announcing the fight plan that we are going to develop. From the very beginning, a complex of military actions in all regional areas, throughout the country, (…), as well as a national strike on November 10,” AKP President José Carlos Martins told reporters this Thursday.
The leader spoke at a press conference after a meeting of the union’s national leadership in Lisbon.
José Carlos Martins warned that if the Ministry of Health does not propose a solution by November 10, other forms of struggle will follow.
“The Ministry of Health continues to not provide answers (…) to the scoring. It is unacceptable that a year after the publication of the diploma allowing the calculation of points, there are still thousands of nurses who are the subject of deep injustice (…) arising from the incorrect calculation of these points,” he emphasized.
The union leader said there was a “very wide range” of nurses who were being unfairly targeted, such as the oldest and most qualified nurses who took office in 2010.
According to José Carlos Martins, the guardianship still does not plan a negotiation process to evaluate nurses, with a view to restoring the parity of nursing careers with higher technical careers in public administration and specialists in parental care. transition to the category of nurse specialist.”
“We demand that the ministry promote the recruitment of more nurses and the implementation of the precarious connections that exist today, because there is a structural flaw with very clear evidence in the thousands of overtime hours that nurses are currently dealing with and we are still far from the acute phase of winter,” – he noted.
“More staff need to be hired and fragile relationships need to be mended,” he stressed.
The latest nurses’ strike brought together several dozen such health workers on June 30 at the Ministry of Health in Lisbon to demand better working conditions.
During the protest, a motion was approved in which the AKP stated that it is “unacceptable and intolerable” that the Ministry of Health continues to fail to respond to nurses’ concerns.