The PSD parliamentary group proposed this Wednesday that the funding of the National Health Service (SNS) and the valuation of all its professionals should be based on results that benefit users.
It is time to value professionals and institutions based on the health results they generate for citizens. As is the case today in USF model B, we propose that all SNS professionals be encouraged and valued for achieving previously contractual results and which translate into the improvement of the health of the Portuguese”, said deputy Ricardo Baptista Leite.
The social-democratic parliamentarian was speaking in a debate on the Statute of the SNS at the initiative of PSD and Chega, who asked for parliamentary appreciation of the decree-law approved by the Council of Ministers in July 2022.
According to him, the PSD also proposes that the indicators on health gains start to be measured “with rigor throughout the system” and to be published transparently and in real time, so that they are “fully accessible both for decision makers as well as for citizens“.
In his speech, Ricardo Baptista Leite also highlighted the need for a more efficient SNS, with a “well defined” chain of command capable of adapting and responding to the transformations of recent years in the health system and society.
“For this reason, the PSD proposes to put an end to the Regional Health Administrations once and for all“, defended the deputy, for whom these bodies ” are bureaucratic colossus that can no longer fulfill the function for which they were created “.
In addition, the PSD intends for the Local Health Units to become the territorial unit of the SNS throughout the country, with the necessary integration and autonomy in clinical management and with multi-year investment capacity, he said.
It is difficult to find a sector where the current crisis of governance affects the daily life of the Portuguese so directly, as is the case of health”, lamented Ricardo Baptista Leite, when pointing out the “almost 1.5 million Portuguese without a family doctor”, the emergency services with “long hours of waiting and difficulty in responding” and “months, if not years, of waiting for a specialist consultation, surgery or even for a simple complementary diagnostic test”.
For Pedro Frazão, from Chega, a parliamentary group that also asked for the appreciation of the Government diploma, the SNS Statute constituted “another fraud and another missed opportunity”, since it did not densify a strategy and did not adopt a model that “ could alter the current paradigm of the increasingly obsolete SNS”.
“The new SNS statute is clearly insufficient in the strengthening of relations between the SNS and the private and social sectors in the area of health and nothing ambitious in the consecration of new operating models that could allow a paradigm shift in public management in order to increase the efficiency and productivity of health services health”, claimed the parliamentarian from Chega.
Catarina Martins, from BE, pointed out that “many socialists who believe in the SNS can only feel cheated with this process” and warned that “there are generations of young people enduring the SNS on their backs without any career prospects”.
In view of this, the BE deputy defended that all SNS workers “have the right to a career”as well as political accountability, so that “there is no executive director of the SNS to make decisions that are political and that the minister does not assume and that parliament and the country cannot scrutinize”.
For the PS parliamentarian, Miguel dos Santos Rodrigues, the new SNS Statute guarantees greater autonomy in the management of institutions and more organization for better functioning of services, through the creation of an executive board.
Some parties seem to fear confusion between the executive leadership and other bodies, the same ones that demanded answers when there was a disarticulation, the same ones that have no answers to the questions they themselves ask”, criticized the socialist parliamentarian, assuring that the PS bench is available to discuss the efficiency of the SNS.
“But we will never exchange the public option that we have for a private resource that is not exceptional and supplementary as the basic health law says”, he underlined.
Joana Cordeiro, from the Liberal Initiative, reiterated that Portugal needs a health system in which the public, private and social sectors “live together on an equal footing and where people can choose where they want to be treated”, noting that “none of this is inferred from the Statute” of the SNS.
He announced that his bench will soon present a new basic health law, a proposal that, in the model of universal access system that IL defends, the current Statute “does not fit”.
For the PCP, João Dias considered that the Statute does not solve the main problems of the SNS and that it was even a “rewind” against the Basic Health Law, in which the PCP had a “decisive intervention”.
Inês Sousa Real, from PAN, warned that “health is not treated with a band-aid”claiming that matters such as the “chronic underfunding of the SNS”, health prevention and measures to retain doctors and nurses were left out of the statute, while Rui Tavares, from Livre, also defended the need to end the “chronic underbudgeting of the SNS”, to invest in new valences and in taking advantage of the Recovery and Resilience Plan to develop reforms in the sector.
Parliamentary appreciation allows deputies to discuss, amend and, at the limit, annul a decree-law, a diploma that is the responsibility of the Government and did not pass the vote in the Assembly of the Republic.