Investments in the SNA have returned $7.8 billion to the economy

Investment in the National Health Service (SNS) in 2022 has returned €7.8 billion to the economy thanks to health care’s impact on absenteeism and productivity, according to a study published on Tuesday.

According to the Sustainable Health Index, developed by the Nova Information Management School (Nova IMS) and presented on Tuesday at the Belém Cultural Center (Lisbon), this income was higher (more than 300 million USD) than the value calculated in 2021 (7.5 billion US dollars). ).

“We are still getting very significant returns. According to our estimates, SNS in 2022 for each user of the system will save 1.6 days of absenteeism and (…) the equivalent of 10 working days of lost days. productivity,” explained study coordinator Pedro Simões Coelho Luse.

In 2022, more than half of Portuguese missed at least one day of work for health reasons, and 6% missed more than 20 days, according to the study. However, the provision of medical care by SNS avoided the equivalent of 1.6 days of absence from work, saving 700 million euros.

The care provided by SNS also avoided 9.9 business days of lost productivity, saving 4.5 billion euros.

Overall, if you add up the impact on absenteeism and productivity, SNS saved €5.2 billion worldwide in wages.

Taking into account the impact of savings on wages and the relationship between productivity and rewards (the INE base value), the study concludes that the care provided by social networks has returned 7.8 billion euros to the economy.

Pedro Simões Coelho speaks of a “significant change” in 2022 in the balance of social media’s contribution to absenteeism and productivity, and explains: significant reduction in absenteeism.

“In the case of productivity, this is not the case, and the contribution of SNS is even higher than in previous years,” he adds.

In this regard, he points to another phenomenon related to the paradigm shift brought about by a different organization of work after the pandemic: “There are many people who [agora] work or can work from home, which means that there are many pathologies that previously gave rise to absenteeism, and now do not (…), because people can work from home, but they can continue to have some effect on loss of productivity » .

“Until 2019, people who had a respiratory infection of varying severity had to stay at home for three to four days, including so as not to infect colleagues. Now they are sitting at home, but remain at work. performance, but that’s a completely different situation,” he adds.

The paper, developed by NOVA-IMS in collaboration with AbbVie, Diário de Notícias and TSF, concludes that system activity in 2022 increased slightly (2.2%) after a significant increase of 13.1% in 2021, the year recovery after the pandemic. . In 2020, this value decreased by 9.8%.

The researcher also points to two other “positive signs” in the collected data: a 3% reduction in the deficit and an 8% reduction in arrears.