Service reopens today after last week’s closure and confusion
Following the confusion over last week’s ‘evacuation’ of maternity and pediatric services from Portimão Hospital, ‘normal service’ has been resumed – with a specific contingency plan created for the summer months.
The executive direction of the SNS State health service has decided that for the next four months (June to September inclusive), the hospital’s labour wards will close on every alternative weekend (that is, every two weeks).
Ten doctors have been drafted in to ‘reinforce the pediatric emergency service’. These professionals have been taken from “various points of the country”, explain reports, “from Hospital Senhora de Oliveira de Guimarães to Hospital Santa Maria in Lisbon”. They include “specialists and interns”.
This far, nothing has been explained on how these doctors were persuaded to work in the Algarve – a region that has suffered for years with low uptake by health professionals when it comes to job vacancies advertised.