This afternoon, the Speaker of the Regional Parliament defended greater coordination between health and social security interests, in order to achieve greater cooperation between these two areas.
This was within the scope of the meeting of the Portuguese Association of Health Management – APEGSAUDE, whose main theme was “Health Literacy”, which was held at the Funchal Cultural and Research Center (CCIF), underscored by José Manuel Rodríguez. “Involving professionals in the debate on health policy reform is essential to making changes to the regional health system.”
Addressing the topic “Can health illiteracy affect the quality and credibility of political debate”, the President of the Legislative Assembly of Madeira requested an assessment “of the means, human resources and forms of interconnection between primary health care and hospital care, so that emergency situations are no longer, as is the case in many Often, the system portal, with all the ensuing consequences.
Among the aspects mentioned by José Manuel Rodríguez in his intervention, emphasis was placed on the existence of the Madeiran population without a family doctor, the non-implementation of the “family nurse idea”, the home hospital project that covers all municipalities, and “the real political birth rate that reflects this demographic winter, which It will make Madeira, in a few years, the oldest region in the country,” were other points launched for public reflection with health professionals, political decision-makers, legislators and CEOs.
He added: “We must discuss how to finance the regional health system, whose expenses are inevitably increasing, given advances in medicine, new treatments, patient requirements and the aging of society.” Emphasis was also placed on health issues, arguing that the people of Madeira should be guaranteed to have the same conditions as the Portuguese on the mainland.
Partisanship, depoliticization and purification of the debate on health in the region is the right way to find the best solutions to progressively improve the services provided to the people, which is, ultimately, the main reason for its existence.
José Manuel Rodríguez, President of the Legislative Assembly of Madeira
In this discussion, José Manuel Rodríguez looks back in history to remember “how important health professionals, especially doctors, were in the creation of the National Health Service, one of the great achievements of our democracy, as was the creation of the National Health Service. The Regional Health Service of Madeira, after the introduction of self-government.” . Among the group, he highlighted Antonio Arnault, founder of the SNS, and the doctors Nelio Mendonça and Miguel Mendonça, who “surprisingly later became presidents of the Legislative Assembly, which embodied and developed the regional health service.”
Participating in the discussion promoted by APEGSAUDE were Rosa Henriques Gouveia, Head of the Faculty of Life Sciences, who addressed how the University, as a center of excellence for knowledge, has been an active and committed agent in the fight against health illiteracy; Nivalda Gouveia Pereira, family physician and Vice President of the Regional Medical Council of the Medical Association, who spoke about health illiteracy as a risk factor for patients, the highly technical and hermetic language of health professionals and access to ‘Dr. Google’; and also Ricardo Miguel Oliveira, Director of Diário de Notícias da Madeira , which brought social media into the discussion as a means of reliable and trustworthy information/training in building critical mass in health.
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