Luis Montenegro says SNS is crashing and defends ‘hitting the table’

PSD President Luis Montenegro said on Tuesday that the National Health Service (SNS) is collapsing due to a lack of human resources and urged the government to “risk other solutions” to overcome the structural problem.

“I don’t want to be blunt, but SNS is failing, not financially, as has traditionally been seen over the years, but in terms of human resources. New solutions,” he said.

Speaking to reporters, at the end of a visit to the Hospital do Litoral Alentejano in Santiago do Casem, Setúbal District, the leader of the Social Democrats stated that the SNS “should have facilities installed in private institutions of social solidarity. , in Misericordias, and also in the private sector.”

“It is necessary to have a health system that also accepts this proposal without ideological complexes, as happened in recent years in Portugal, and it is necessary to have a public policy that leaves the drawing board,” as is the case with housing, he said. emphasized.

And for this reason, he urged the government to “look at it” rather than expecting that “there are some incentives and some palliatives that can overcome the situation, which is structural.”

According to Luis Montenegro, who this Tuesday visited the municipalities of Alcácer do Sal, Grandola, Sines and Santiago do Casem as part of the Sentir Portugal initiative, which will last until Thursday in the district of Setúbal, the lack of human resources in health is due to other structural problems that “further exacerbate this situation”.

“Firstly, the lack of housing and secondly, the lack of an efficient transport network, and thus the government policies are intertwined and lead to a result that is actually a lack of professionals in the SNS,” they pointed out.

On the Alentejo coast, the PSD leader found that out of about 106,000 users, “about 20% do not have an appointed family doctor” and that there are several gaps due to “lack of medical staff” and “also nurses.”

“In Portugal, we are on track to surpass the 2 million Portuguese who do not have a family doctor, and in fact this is a completely unsustainable situation,” he warned.

At the end of the meeting with the board of directors of the local health department of the Alentejo Coast, Luis Montenegro felt that the government had “utterly irresistibly failed”.

“We’ve been waiting six years to see the plan [para] to offer more housing than the prime minister had presented. This year he came to introduce her, five years later, and she hasn’t left the drawing board. And the way it is conceived, will not have, from our point of view, results in terms of execution, ”he criticized.

Still for the SDS leader, the country “is reaching a point where the lack of vision of António Costa and the PS is reflected in the blockages of essential public services, and the health service is at the head of these blockages,” he concluded. .