Portugal, eternally vulnerable – Observer
In a previous article, I already underlined that being a doctor is a profession with rights and duties, so whoever chooses to be a doctor obviously has natural aspirations to be well paid. A doctor deals with a basic need enshrined in elementary human rights, health, just as other professions deal with others (teacher with education or an engineer with housing). However, in the case of doctors, illiterate, petty, and contemptuous societies generally tend to vilify them for being above average! For all the safe professionals who work all the professionals and who are great hours of their professional life. In the pandemic, in a tight situation, doctors, and health professionals in general, were demagogically dubbed heroes. Once the affliction is over, we quickly return to the pettiness and disdain that sadly characterizes us.
That is, in view of the wage leveling below the machines that make themselves, causing them to be built abroad, identical to those of the demographic winter of Portugal, a country that drops below the machines), I will now describe one in the ocean at machines inefficient management that rages in the nation, condemning it to be eternally vulnerable, poor and beggar.
Notice no. 10047/2017 of 31 August, published in the Diário da República, opened the Competition for the Degree of Consultant in the field of medical careers. In October 2021 (!) I and other colleagues performed the same exam data, having been performed as exam data. However, our category and the corresponding remuneration position have not yet been updated. According to information collected by telephone from the Central Administration of the Health System (ACSS), they are awaiting authorization from the Ministry of Finance, having exhausted the budget foreseen for this tender.
However, facing what happened with emergency urgency in the past, the guardianship, published in a purely reactive summer, Decree-Law No. by health establishments integrated in the National Health Service (SNS) or a wing of the hourly rate of work in addition to the 51st hour. However, in addition to this individual, the long-term plan for the reorganization of health services in general is not known, which focuses on the adequate and efficient allocation of limited average resources (human, infrastructural and financial), focusing structurally, for example , emergencies in metropolitan models (such as those that exist in Porto in the area of Psychiatry and Pediatrics) or promoting the valorization of medical careers (mitigating the stampede of professionals out of the SNS). It’s never too much to remember that you’re in trouble, usual reply message, the prime minister who has been facing these in office since 2015!
In a country of proximity, with privileged accessibility, which measures just over 200 kilosmeters from east to west, connected by a network of highways that is the second largest in Europe by inhabitant, it is incomprehensible, as a rule, always possible and that no plan is found for the construction of health services (hospital and community) that aggregate nearby localities or that take advantage of installed capacities, logically, establish emergencies (drastically reducing the number of of health professionals for independent emergencies). Thus, there is an efficient management of quality resources and the quality of health without carrying capacity in conditions of medical care and training load. Of course, we all liked that Portugal had unlimited resources, did not have a huge financial debt that was resilient to other and cyclical international crises and, consequently, could have, so to speak, a doctor “at the doorstep” of each citizen and locality. But, unfortunately, this is not the reality, so it is imperative to manage criteria and in a systemic way the existing resources.
In short, the executive who claims he does not have the budget to carry out an update in the career of some professionals who finally concluded with the same exam as the Professional Contest for the 2017 Degree, issues a decree for the 2017 Degree, issues a law giving freedom to hire doctors as needed to stabilize the operation of all emergency services! Medium-long term structural plan for the SNS? No country, at least for now… In a country that passively accepts the breach of promises like that of family doctors (Costa promises family doctor for all Portuguese in 2017) or TAP’s “joke” (June 2020: TAP will be nationalized; September 2022: Government accelerates privatization of TAP and wants to complete it in 2023; September 2022: António Costa supports sale of TAP at a profit) we cannot, unfortunately, say that this absence of plan, rigor, demand, accountability and transparency is surprising.
The one discussed here is a small example of how Portugal is thought and small. It continues to put the willing public, partisan or corporate, ahead of reality, managing money in an arbitrary and inefficient manner, without the medium-long term and without a systemic vision of the country. In this regard, I quote Sergio Sousa Pinto who, in a conversation on CNN Portugal with Maria Lurdes Rodrigues, said: “So what if there is not enough money for the SNS? For the SNS? There’s all the money you need! I mean, is this some discussion? This is an auction fair, a crazy auction. When you leave the territory of poetry, between those who will hire and the poor will have to negotiate a backward country, we will solve the problems.”
When the mainstay of political thinking should be sober, serious and centered on the efficient management of the limited resources that we, as a poor country, have, people generally continue to live in a kind of Twilight Zone, denying reality and compromising the good -being of present and future generations.