Seven pregnant women have been sent from Santa Maria Hospital in Lisbon to give birth in private hospitals since the beginning of this month, the Lusa Centro Hospitalar Universitário Lisboa Norte (CHULN) reported this Thursday.
“Since July 2, CHULN, in agreement with the National Institute of Emergency Medical Services (INEM), has sent seven pregnant women to private units,” and during the same period, 56 births were performed at the Santa Maria Hospital, the largest in the country. world.country, advanced hospital center.
“These low-risk referrals for pregnant women through the Safe Birth 2023 Plan are designed to maintain CHULN’s differentiated capabilities in fulfilling its ultimate mission by providing a response to difficult, higher-risk or preterm births,” emphasized He.
On the 2nd of this month, the hospital center announced that low-risk pregnant women referred to Santa Maria Hospital could be referred to private hospitals due to “clinical scope limitations” of the delivery room.
The CHULN statement explained that the decision was due to “the inability to work more than 150 hours a year overtime, which the department’s doctors have taken on, and the resignation of the heads of the OB/GYN ambulance team.”
“Due to clinical scale limitations, the maternity ward at Santa Maria Hospital will operate in the coming days with an adaptation to the number of women in labor referred from other institutions,” the same information note says.
According to CHULN, Santa Maria Hospital teams will continue to provide high-risk births, but “for reasons of predictability for families in CHULN, the plan’s exceptional private agency collaboration mechanism has been activated for the summer season of ‘Born Safely on Social’.”
Starting this summer, CHULN’s mother and child department will begin retraining work with a total investment of over six million euros and should take nine months.
These investments include the construction of 12 new delivery rooms, two operating rooms and an observation room with a total area of about one thousand square meters.
It is also planned to repair and expand the hospitalization of puerperas (the period from childbirth to the recovery of mothers), the reconstruction of the obstetric ultrasound room and the expansion of the neonatology service.
It is envisaged that while the maternity ward of the Santa Maria Hospital is closed for work – in August and September – services will be concentrated in the San Francisco Xavier Hospital (Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Oeste), which has been operating non-stop for seven days since the 1st of August in Week.
About fifty doctors, nurses and operating room assistants gathered this Thursday at the entrance to the Santa Maria hospital against the closure of maternity hospitals in the summer and for an end to the referral of pregnant women to private hospitals.
The lawsuit also sought to challenge the dismissal in June of OB/GYN/Reproductive Medicine Director Diogo Aires de Campos, with the CHULC administration alleging that the physician “repeatedly questioned the work design and process of collaborating with San Francisco Xavier Hospital during the work of the new maternity hospital at Santa Maria Hospital.
At the end of June, Health Minister Manuel Pizarro considered that work in the maternity ward of the Santa Maria hospital was “really extraordinary” and could not be carried out while the service was open.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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