(ANSA) – LISBON, December 6 – After a chaotic weekend at many emergency hospital services in Portugal, this week couldn’t be any better either, especially in the Lisbon metropolitan area. The average wait time for a patient in a D.C. emergency room is about eleven hours, if they are lucky enough to find it open. The workers suffer from the closure of other centers due to the lack of workers. Today’s news is that the Children’s Emergency Service in Setubal, a large town south of the Tagus and a few kilometers from Lisbon, will remain closed all week.
The Portuguese National Health Service does not seem to have been able to cope with the pressures of the epidemic, and the harshness of the cold season, with its consequent increase in diseases, is not helped. The situation is exacerbated by the lack of family doctors. In 2022, at the peak of retirements among medical workers, the number of Portuguese without a family doctor will reach 1 million 400 thousand, of which 25% will be in the capital.
Organized in neighborhood health centers, family health units (a kind of community homes or comprehensive spaces) have recently been extended. Recently, general practitioners also extend the reception hours of the public, but the response is still not enough and this ends up fatally for the influx in Emergency rooms are already exhausted. The new health minister, Manuel Pizarro, who replaced former minister Marta Temedo in September after deaths in hospital emergency services, denies the chaos, but recognizes the difficult moment and announces new appointments starting early next year. (Dealing).
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