Heads of service present bloc resignations
After presenting excuses of responsibility last summer, team leaders at Lisbon’s São Francisco Xavier hospital are once again threatening to walk out. Their resignation letter announcing that they intend to leave ‘en masse’ was sent to the hospital’s administrative council today.
Its intention will be to kick-start the process of improvements ‘assured’ last summer, but which have failed to move forwards.
Bloc letters of resignation almost never actually see whole teams ‘walk out’. They are used more as a ‘cry of alert’.
Today’s “criticises the lack of solutions to problems in the service”, explain reports.
The letter has been signed by 16 doctors of internal medicine who admit the crisis they are living through is “old” but stress it has worsened in recent years.
These are essentially the same medical team leaderswho signed up to last summer’s protest. They say in today’s letter (which has also been sent to the General Medical Council and syndicates) that negotiations with the hospital’s administrative council did start last summer, “with a view to finding solutions to remedy the shortcomings complained about”. But the last seven months – in spite of the doctors’ willingness to collaborate with the institution – “not one structural change was proposed or executed, meaning the problem that motivated the first letter has worsened, as anticipated”.
This is just another ‘headache’ in the SNS health service panorama which remains full of them.