On Thursday, the Prime Minister said the Government was achieving its emergency health plan targets but acknowledged it would be “irresponsible and unrealistic to say emergency services are doing well”.
“What I can say is that we are meeting the requirements. We are fulfilling our priorities. We have made it a priority to restore the cancer waiting list, and this has materialized: all those who have exceeded the maximum guaranteed response time have either had surgery or are scheduled to have surgery in the next few weeks,” the Prime Minister emphasized.
Luis Montenegro spoke to journalists after visiting the Santa Maria Hospital in Lisbon, accompanied by the President of the Republic Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and the Minister of Health Ana Paula Martins.
The chief executive refused to “sell the Portuguese people illusions” about the current state of the sector, saying the National Health Service, inherited by the current leader from the previous Socialist, “was acting in a completely chaotic manner and had no idea about the improvements that needed to be made.”
“It would be completely irresponsible and unrealistic to say that the emergency department is doing well and that there is full response capacity. We know that is not the case. We hope that next summer, thanks to the work that we have done this year, we will be able to avoid the problems that we have had this summer and especially the problems that we have had over the last eight years,” he said.
However, the Prime Minister highlighted the fact that “there were 19,050 calls from pregnant women who, rather than seeking an available emergency service, were redirected to teams already waiting to help them.”
“Having learned this, I ask the Portuguese men and women: are we more or less capable of responding? There is still much to do,” he admitted.
Montenegro assured that “Portuguese pregnant women have reasons to be safer today than they were six months ago.”
“And I want to believe and I want to tell them that in a year they will have reasons to be even safer,” he added.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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