Hospital administrator calls for cross-party consensus on health measures

The president of the Portuguese Association of Hospital Administrators (APAH) defended in Parliament this Thursday the “minimum consensus” between the parties on the implementation of health measures, an example of emergency reorganization.

“It was very important that we could have a minimum consensus among the main political forces to implement a set of measures. If this consensus does not happen, it will always be very difficult for us to implement any plan,” warned Xavier Barreto, who gave an interview this year Thursday to the parliamentary health committee.

In front of the deputies monitoring the implementation of the plan for reforms in the sphere of emergency situations and healthcare approved by the government at the end of May, the association’s president gave the example of the shift work of emergency services, which is “difficult to maintain.”

“We’re always running on resources. One week we have doctors because we have providers who can work shifts, and the next week we don’t have them. Every week we have to update maps that people have to consult to know where they need to go,” laments a hospital administrator.

Xavier Barreto said the previous National Health Service (SNS) executive intended to transform the current rotating emergency solution into a “fixed scheme” which in some regions of the country involved “the assumption that some emergencies would be close by and focus the response” on one service.

“Perhaps this concentration of resources was better for the people, it was a more predictable reaction,” says the president of APAH, for whom, however, this will be a measure “extremely unpopular and extremely difficult to implement for all reasons until there is a conflict with local authorities.”

“Unless there is a very strong political consensus to implement these reforms, they will be very difficult to implement,” he stressed.

While stressing that the government’s plan “includes measures that are important and worth implementing”, the association’s president stressed that the document lacks relevant issues related to the governance model, investment and the ability to retain NHS professionals.

Recalling that the plan also announced structural measures, Xavier Barreto considered that it represented an “excessive focus on additional payments” for health workers, without taking into account the reform of careers and salaries.

“It was presented to us as an emergency program, but also a structural one. If it is a structural plan, you need to think about careers, career paths, lifelong learning, working conditions, you need to think about a number of things. That is not in the plan,” he said.

He also added that the plan contained “very little information about the governance model” the government was recommending for the NHS, meaning that it favoured the operating structure of local health units, intermediate management and what roles should be played by who in hospital administration.

At the end of May, the government approved a health emergency and transformation plan consisting of five priority axes, which include 54 measures to be implemented urgently, in a prioritized and structured manner.