Yet further talks to avert ‘crisis’ at a regional hospital will be going ahead tomorrow inHospital da Póvoa after another team of doctors has tendered the bloc resignations.
As with all previous bloc resignations, the team in the northern hospital’s A&E department has cited a “serious lack of medical personnel”.
And similarly to all previous bloc resignations over the last few weeks and months, the doctors have already done more than the stipulated number of ‘extra hours service’ (ie ‘overtime’).,
Jorge Roque da Cunha, president of SIM, the syndicate of doctors, said this latest crisis will most certainly put A&E care, and patients, at the hospital at risk.
In this context, yesterday’s ‘Prime Minister’s Christmas message’ to the nation has been put into sharp perspective.
António Costa did his best to praise medical staff for their extraordinary efforts throughout the last two years of pandemic, but without investment, say critics, these are simply empty words: ‘the usual government propaganda’.
The elephant in the room is how can a government continue to spend millions on providing perfectly healthy (asymptomatic) citizens with free tests for Covid-19, when those millions would be far better spent on increasing the capacity of the financially strapped SNS health service?
For now, the latest hospital to ‘protest’ in the only way, short of out-and-out strike, available will see a meeting tomorrow “focused on finding solutions in the hope that difficulties can be overcome” .
