Lisbon. 728,000 spend winter without a family doctor
In September there were more than one million Portuguese without a family doctor assigned, more than 70% concentrated in the Lisbon and Vale do Tejo region. The latest data published by the Ministry of Health show that in September there were 728 354 users without a family doctor in the Lisbon region (18.9% of the total number of users registered with the NHS in the region). A year ago, in the same month, there were 635,000.
Since there are comparable records on the Ministry of Health’s information platform – the year 2016 – this will really be the winter with the highest number of users in Lisbon without monitoring by a family doctor. In Alentejo, the Center region and the North region there are now fewer patients without a doctor than a year ago, and there is also an increase in users without a doctor in the Algarve, on a smaller scale than in Lisbon.
There are currently 81,000 users without a doctor, compared to 79,300 in September 2020. The difference is, however, more noticeable when comparing North and Lisbon, with roughly the same number of users registered in the NHS, around 3.3 million people in each region.
A year ago, in the North there were only 160,000 users without a family doctor and there are now 79,000, almost ten times less than in Lisbon. Even so, with regard to emergency congestion, the responsible for the service in S. João, Nelson Pereira, has already defended the need to regulate access, to avoid overloading with non-urgent patients, which hinders the response to urgent and emerging patients. , he told i, considering that pedagogy has not been enough even in the North, where coverage is almost total in primary care, with difficult access in recent months because of the pandemic.