Portuguese hospitals hang by a thread with closed A&E departments, lack of staff and long queues

Closed A&E departments, a shortage of health professionals, waiting times far above of what is acceptable and a faulty new triage system. Portugal's national health service is on the verge of collapse.

For Pedro Pita Barros, a specialist in health economics, the problem lies in the ability to organise and manage.

"To a certain extent it's management too, but to a certain extent it's competition with the private sector. It's much more capable of working well in terms of recruitment and retention, of paying more attention to people. So we have two big tension points here, pure and hard management and a human resources issue. These will perhaps be the biggest challenges over the next three years," the professor of economics at Nova School of Business and Economics explains to Euronews.

In May 2024, the government presented a Health Emergency and Transformation Plan to be implemented in 3 months to guarantee general access to healthcare.

Without much immediate progress in sight and with some hospital A&E units exceeding 30-hour waiting times, the Prime Minister said last week in a fortnightly debate in Parliament that the executive is still not satisfied with the results.

Pedro Pita Barros is hopeful that the plan will now stop being an emergency and become a programme of continuous improvement, which will also undergo adjustments itself.

"We have to get away from the idea that we're going to be able to solve the problems of the National Health Service in a month or two. The problem isn't making rules or yet another law to transform the national health service. The question isn't whether we're going to have a date when we reform the SNS, the question is how we can permanently adjust the national health service to the needs that