Health reform – opinion

But it is not possible to fulfill public service responsibilities without allocating minimum resources, capable of rehabilitating infrastructures, ensuring the mobilization of the required volume and quality of professionals and ensuring the formulation of responses for a closer and more efficient service. The health field is of course crucial to ensuring the well-being of citizens and is also one of the most demanding in terms of allocating public resources. It is, unfortunately, one of the countries that have responded less to the wishes of the population and where there is more asymmetry across the national territory.

According to Fernando Araujo, Executive Director of the National Health Service Network, the upcoming establishment of 31 new Local Health Units (ULS), bringing together hospital units and health centers in each region, “is the great health reform.” In summary, ULS in health can achieve many of the above objectives, starting with ensuring clinical integration between different levels of care. In addition, sharing human resources, information, financial resources, and the management level is no less important. But it is still strange that since this is a “major reform”, we are witnessing almost indifference on the part of different political forces on this subject and we only see critical reactions at the local level (from CIM Douro, PSD Porto and PS Ovar – which even demanded the resignation of the Minister of Health ). And let us listen to the current president of the Medical Association as he laments the “lack of union participation” and reinforces his predecessor’s criticism of the “poor performance of the ULS”, which has already been present in Portugal since 1999.In 2015, the Health Regulatory Authority published a study on the performance of ULS between 2011 and 2013 which reported that between areas with ULS and those without ULS, outcomes were worse on several indicators. The same can be read in the master’s thesis prepared by Ines Dias de Matos from the National School of Public Health (2013), on “Comparative analysis of the impact of ULS and ACeS (groups of health centres) in the process of jointness between primary care” health care and hospital health care”. The advisor was Adalberto Campos Fernandez.

But it is not possible to fulfill public service responsibilities without allocating minimum resources, capable of rehabilitating infrastructures, ensuring the mobilization of the required volume and quality of professionals and ensuring the formulation of responses for a closer and more efficient service.