Health minister ‘appreciates’ and ‘takes very seriously’ doctors’ reactions to meetings

Health Minister Ana Paula Martins said this Friday that the government is ready to listen to the doctors, “evaluate the reaction” they had at the negotiating meeting this Friday and “take it very seriously.”

“We are ready to listen to what the doctors have told us, to evaluate the reaction of the doctors today, to take this very seriously, because we take these negotiations very seriously and the need that we have for our doctors, nurses, pharmacists. – and everyone else, but now we are negotiating with them – if you want to stay in the National Health Service (SNS),” the Health Minister said on the sidelines of a visit to the San Francisco Xavier Hospital in Lisbon, late afternoon.

The government, represented by the Ministry of Health and Public Administration, is negotiating with the unions of doctors, nurses and pharmacists who want a career review and salary increases, and today the structures representing the doctors refused to sign the negotiation protocol. for not including in the negotiations all the issues they wanted to discuss, namely the revision of the salary scale.

“He recommends all the caution and all the need for dialogue that we now look at what we have been asked, and it is for this reason that we will have to look at what we have been asked, and this is the guarantee that I can give to all doctors,” said the minister, expressing his readiness to work “and add to the protocol what the legitimate expectations of doctors are.”

When asked if SNS doctors could expect a raise equivalent to the one recently decided for regular doctors, who will see a 40% increase in hourly rates, Ana Paula Martins said the goal is for SNS professionals to “work within their teams “

“We will do everything to ensure that our specialists in the SNS have the best conditions for staying in the SNS and performing their tasks,” he said.

Regarding the possibility of negotiations to limit the SNS response in the summer and what the contingency plan will be for this period, the Minister acknowledged that “there is a way forward and the government is very interested and absolutely ready to go down that path”, but stressed that the contingency plan is emergency plan, which will be released next week to SNS, is more comprehensive than the summer emergency plan.

Ana Paula Martins sent details of the plan for next week and the explanations that Prime Minister Luis Montenegro will give.

The minister, who left the administration of the Santa Maria Hospital in Lisbon as a result of a break with the government over the decision to adopt a new model of management of local health facilities (ULS) for this hospital department, was today reluctant to commit himself with any intention of changing this model, noting that he will work with the boards of directors of the new ULS, acknowledging that “a lot of things are going well.”

Ana Paula Martins also left a safety guarantee regarding the news reporting more than a hundred generic medicines sold in Portugal, the sale of which, on the recommendation of the European Commission, will be suspended and authorizations revoked after an assessment by the European Commission. The Medicines Agency concluded that it was not possible to prove their equivalence to the reference medicines.

“The medicines that we have in Portugal and that are identified as medicines included in this warning and this supervision are absolutely not at risk. The risk is completely controlled and therefore we ask everyone to be confident that everything we have, the Portuguese market at the moment is completely safe, this is a guarantee,” the minister said.

However, Infarmed announced that it will continue to sell eight of the more than 100 drugs tested by the Synapse laboratory in India and Portugal.