Hospitals continue to receive fewer patients than they were before the pandemic. Health is slower

Despite the increasingly low numbers for Covid-19, the Portuguese Association of Hospital Officials (APAH) says health services have not yet returned to the activity levels they were before the pandemic.

The association has been warning for months about Covid’s effects on the many other patients not directly affected by SARS-COV-2. He now tells President Alexander Lourenço TSF Hospitals, for example, continue to receive fewer patients referred by health services or by screening for diseases such as tumors.

“We have not returned to the levels of access we had before and are still facing serious difficulties, which of course will have strong repercussions on the health of the Portuguese,” warns a representative of hospital officials.

Hospitals are still receiving fewer patients and Alexander Lawrenceau speaks of “major limitations in primary health care, where the professionals are the same who are undergoing the vaccination process and cannot do two activities at the same time – vaccination and healthcare. The whole population.”

On the other hand, “the health system is slower, and there are new processes in place. Reactivating the entire system and returning to previous levels of productivity is always more difficult, so we continue to notice the limitations in returning to the activity levels that we had in previous years and who were already deficient. Regarding the needs of the population, ”they“ keep us below the pre-pandemic level. ”

In early May, the Portuguese Association of Hospital Officials (APAH) opened the applications for the eighth edition of the Healthcare Excellence Award for Innovative Projects.