Urgent patients facing more than nine hours of wait times in Portuguese hospitals

Patients visiting Portuguese hospitals with urgent cases are having to wait more than nine hours in some cities until they can be admitted into hospitals.

The government’s National Health Service – the SNS – reported on Monday that many hospitals in the capital Lisbon are struggling with high demands and shortages in labour.

Urgent patients at the Amadora Sintra Hospital in the outskirts of Lisbon faced an average of eight hour waiting periods before they were able to see a medical professional.

But the excessively long wait times are not just limited to Lisbon. In Coimbra and Portimão, nine hour wait times for urgent patients were also reported. The situation there slightly improved later in the day after local health officials activated contingency plans to better manage the situation.

The delays are not just affecting needing patients, but also other state services. Mario Conde, a Fire Brigade Commander in Amadora says the delays are suffocating their resources.  

“We have some constraints in the emergency service for the population because we have a lot of services in the area of ​​hospital support and having an ambulance at the hospital for 40 minutes is a long time and we can hardly provide quick and effective assistance with this waiting time because there is a lack of resources for all the people.”

The increased demand on Portuguese health facilities is due to a recent outbreak of bird flu. The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) reported an outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) strains among poultry on a farm near Lisbon on Monday.

The H5N1 strain was detected in a flock of more than 55,000 birds in the village of São João das Lampas, approximately 40 km away from the capital. The outbreak caused