The president of the Algarve’s regional health board, the Local Health Unit (ULS), has disputed emergency department waiting times published on the SNS Portal for Faro and Portimão hospitals, blaming the figures on errors in the computer system.
Speaking to journalists, Tiago Botelho explained that the data published by the National Health Service (SNS) portal is fed by the Alert system, which under normal circumstances calculates average waiting times based on only a few hours of activity. He said the figures published by the portal were “not accurately reflecting” the situation in the emergency departments in Faro and Portimão.
The methodology makes the figures “sensitive to small numbers where there may have been a real or administrative problem”, particularly overnight, when the number of admissions is lower.
“In the case of last night [Friday and Saturday morning], we had errors in the Alert system,” he said, explaining that, during the morning, the hospitals in Faro and Portimão were showing waiting times that “were not true”.
He pointed to Portimão as an example, where the system at one stage showed a 17-hour wait for a patient classified as “very urgent”. Once the error was corrected, the average waiting time “abruptly went from 13 hours to four hours, within minutes”, a change he described as “obviously mathematically impossible”.
At 2.50pm, the SNS Portal showed a 41-minute waiting time in Faro for urgent patients, a figure Botelho said was “close to reality”.
This comes following comments from the Health Minister, Ana Paula Martins, noting that emergency department waiting times are “significantly better” than they were two years ago, despite excessive delays during periods of peak demand, particularly in the Algarve.
Martins said there had been an improvement in the response provided by emergency departments across Portugal’s National Health Service, noting that over the past two years there had been “situations where emergency departments were closed, which is no longer happening”.
The improvement in care, she explained, was the result of several measures aimed at reorganising services, including better patient referral and directing non-urgent cases to primary healthcare.
The minister nevertheless rejected the idea that waits of several hours in emergency departments could be considered acceptable, particularly “when patients are classified as urgent”.
Martins also said the reorganisation of the emergency care network, being overseen by the SNS Executive Directorate through a review of the patient referral system, would be a process expected to lead to the creation of metropolitan and regional emergency departments. It would also have to address the clinical governance of emergency services themselves.
The changes require an “alteration in practices and behaviour, which could take years”, but the Government “will not back down from the reorganisation currently under way”, she said.
The minister was speaking at the signing of an addendum to a cooperation agreement between the Central Administration of the Health System (ACSS), the Algarve Local Health Unit, and the municipalities of Loulé and Faro, concerning access infrastructure for the new Central Algarve Hospital, which is due to be completed in 2031.
Under the addendum, the councils of Faro and Loulé, which oversee the area where the new hospital will be built, at Parque das Cidades, have agreed to contribute €1 million towards the construction of access and exit infrastructure connecting the hospital to the public road network, as well as sewerage, water, and electricity connections. The remaining costs will be covered by the central government.
Source: LUSA
Photo credit: Archive image
