President of the Order of Doctors, Miguel Guimarães was at the Faro Hospital A&E unit earlier today, following the decision of surgeons to refuse to work overtime in the emergency room.
To journalists Miguel Guimarães stressed the "huge lack of human resources" and highlighted that "even considering the resources that exist", the facilities at Faro Hospital no longer have the capacity to provide efficient and useful service.
“There is not even enough room for emergency surgery services to have at least two operating theatres. There is only one team and one room. Patients have to wait their turn to be able to enter. In a multipurpose emergency centre, the minimum would be to have two rooms and a third to be opened in case they have more serious cases at the same time. Space limitation has long been identified, I am not saying anything new” he expressed.
"This is probably the most urgent case in the country in terms of a region requiring a new hospital," he said.
Mr. Guimarães detailed the terrible facilities available further. “At a meeting I spoke to someone who is a younger doctor. They told me: I can't do what I have been learning here, especially in highly technological areas. Some equipment doesn’t even exist here. Access to new technology is absolutely essential. I think equipment-level interventions have not been updated at all over the last five years.”
“If we don't have the adequate space for people to work well, if we don't motivate professionals to stay here, it's clear that we can't solve the Algarve problem” concluded Mr. Guimarães. This issue isn’t helped by the fluctuating population of the region, conditioned by seasonality, which is still not taken into consideration by the hospital’s administration.
“We have nearly two million people here, and we really have conditions that do not fit the responsiveness that this population needs. The Algarve is the external image of the country in terms of tourism standards.
In his visit to the hospital, Guimarães made various reports about issues at play in the region’s health service. One thing that stuck out to him that goes unmentioned is the lack of basic surgical equipment such as scalpels There are urgent surgeries that are not done because there is simply not enough space, or lack of adequate equipment. Patients end up waiting for surgery. This state of affairs, which can happen on time, must be resolved quickly.
The hospital itself tells a similar story. Director of the hospital’s surgical service, Martins dos Santos, claims that Faro is "the most distinguished hospital in the region." As such “you have to be able to treat all patients. That is not what happens. Working conditions are terrible and they have been degrading in recent times.”
“The urgency of improvements to the surgical service, due to a huge lack of conditions, has led to the exhaustion of doctors, who are unable to continue working. For over a year now doctors have been referring to this situation, changes have been promised, but have not materialized. Tiredness reaches all service. There is a position taken by surgeons not to continue to perform more than normal work in the service, without any overtime work because there are no conditions to do so," he explained.
Mr. Santos revealed that “doctors are not simply leaving the services, they just keep working the minimum number of hours the law provides. They are not responsible for doing extra work without necessary conditions. They are too tired. They are exhausted from rowing against the tide, for that is what we have been doing.”
The official also refutes the solution sought out by the hospital’s board of directors. “We regret that this is so, because simply hiring more medical doctors is not the solution to this problem. For one thing, the board is taking a position that can be very dangerous for patients.”
“These temporary medical doctors are surgeons who come here, they operate on the sick, and they have to follow up on them. But it turns out they don't follow up on the sick as once your 24-hour shift is over, you go home and forget about it. Therefore, the patient is abandoned, and that has legal implications. That is why the surgeons made a document declining any responsibility for the follow-up of patients who were not operated on by us, and who were operated on by outsiders,” he explained.
For now surgeons will wait until January 1st, the date when they will refuse to do any emergency work. The president of the Order of Doctors, Miguel Guimarães, was in solidarity with the professionals of the hospital. “They can't take it anymore. They have the full solidarity of the Order of Doctors. They are often working without complete adequate clinical safety, which is not at all advised. When we feel that the carpet is slipping under our feet and we are having a hard time, we have to give a warning shout. That's what these doctors are doing.”
This chaos is nothing more than a sign that something has to be done, and the medical professional are simply giving a deadline to show that they are serious about changing the way the hospital operates. Obviously a solution depends partially on action taken by the board of directors, but above all it is up to the Ministry of Health to look at this situation.
