The first team in the country specializing only in emergency situations began working at the San Jose hospital.

Around 300 specialists from the local health unit of São José (ULS) in Lisbon, including doctors, nurses and senior diagnostic and therapeutic specialists, form the country’s first team dedicated exclusively to emergencies.

“This is the first Center for Integrated Responsibility of Emergency Services (CRISU) to appear at the national level” and began its work on June 17, ULS San Jose President Rosa Valente de Matos told Lusa.

The team of 298 professionals, which will grow to 339, will also include social workers, technical assistants and operational assistants.

“This is a multidisciplinary team, it works very well, and at the moment I think that the users have also received great satisfaction, since it is a large-scale project,” emphasized ULS President San Jose.

For Rosa Valente de Matos, “the hospital center is proud to have such a team that can do other work at a time of year when everyone is talking about emergency complications.”

General practitioners Felizbela Gómez and Ana Bravo accepted the challenge to join this team, created in accordance with the decree of January 30, which establishes in a first phase the creation of five CRISU pilot projects, which will also begin at the ULS Santa Maria, Coimbra. , São João and Santo António.

“When they proposed this new project to us in an attempt to solve some immediate problems and optimize the care of seriously ill patients, I agreed,” said Felizbela Gomez from the San Jose Hospital, where the ULS multipurpose general emergency department operates.

Ana Bravo, for her part, highlighted the benefits of this new organizational model, which aims to “improve the entire journey of seriously ill patients” from admission to the emergency department.

“It tries to distinguish urgent patients from non-urgent ones, so that those who really need emergency care can get emergency care and we can give these patients more attention,” added Felizbela Gomez.

Other goals, he noted, are reducing patient wait times, speeding up therapeutic decisions, and diverting “more non-urgent patients” to other care.

At this initial stage, the team consists of 16 therapists, but the idea, according to Ana Bravo, is to increase the number of doctors by the end of the year so that the team is constantly providing emergency services, as it currently provides 12 hours a year. daily (from 8:00 to 20:00) every day of the week.

Noting that it was “a little early” to sum up the team’s work, Ana Bravo said that “the idea is that everything is going well.”

“We’re at a stage where we’re still figuring out what we can improve, what are the least good things, but I think the most important thing is that we’re all very motivated to make sure everything goes well, and I think that’s very important. at this early stage of the project,” the doctor said, always paying attention to her cell phone to see if she was getting an emergency call.

Having worked at San Jose Hospital for 28 years, Paulo Barreiro, CRISU’s nurse coordinator, said he knows the emergency service “back and forth” where it is “challenging” every day to provide a “quality” response to users. and family members.

He considered the new project challenging because “it allows for more flexible management,” directing patients to the most appropriate level of care within the facility by coordinating care and resources within ULS as well as with other facilities.

“This project is a challenge and I think it is going very well and all the preparatory work that was done before the first day of work only makes us proud and even more motivated to continue,” emphasized Paulo Barreiro.

Rosa Valente de Matos emphasized that the emergency service, which is a central service, requires a lot of human resources and this reorganization aims to create synergy so that the services can function better.

“The goal is for professionals to be more satisfied because they will also have more incentives, for users to be more satisfied and for there to be an increase in efficiency for the entire San Jose ULS,” which also includes primary health care. post-acute care. and home hospitalization, the ULS president said.

According to the decree establishing CRISU, health professionals from the various fields that make up this organizational model have access to various incentives, including financial ones, that are directly related to the results achieved.