One in ten Portuguese patients prescribed medicines by a doctor last year was unable to purchase them due to lack of funds.This percentage was lower than in 2016, according to a study by Universidade Nova de Lisboa, which showed 10.8% patients unable to buy their medicines due to the cost of the drugs, down from 11.8% in 2016 and way down from 15.7% in 2014.
This study involved 500 interviews in a universe of more than 8.6 million patients whose results were extrapolated according to the variables of gender and age group.
Of these patients, in 60% of the cases, some of the prescribed drugs were for prolonged courses of treatment for treatment of a chronic disease.
The study revealed also that, although the ‘quality of services’ decreased slightly last year (66.7%, 1.6% less than in 2016), the effective technical quality of the NHS - which used 13 validated and weighted indicators by a group of experts - rose substantially, reaching 73.8% (5.3 points up on the previous year).
It was a mix of these results about activity, the expense and the deficit of the National Health Service that allowed the researchers to calculate an overall index figure for healthcare in the country that progressed from 102.2 to 103.0 points between 2016 and 2017.
The survey did not take into account those potential patients that did not book to see a doctor for fear of the costs involved.
