Clinching a government contract is one thing; getting paid for services rendered is quite another. The Observatory on Health Service Spending reveals that ‘payments in arrears to suppliers have had an expressive increase this year’, compared to delays registered in 2019 and 2021. Up till July this year, the SNS health service owed €694 million. This is a massive difference to the way payments were processed just last year, for instance, when by December ‘only’ €110 million was waiting to be paid out for goods/ services supplied. Says the Observatory, “the recent creation of an SNS health service executive (…) might bring a transformational new dynamic to management mechanisms of the SNS”. That is definitely one of the hopes.
