The national leader of SEP, Guadalupe Simões, highlighted the severe shortage of nurses and the excessive working hours currently endured by her colleagues, stating, “What we really want is to alert the public to the brutal shortage of nurses and the overload of hours that our colleagues are currently subjected to.”
The campaign titled ‘Our life has no overtime’ launched today at Faro Hospital will culminate on Friday at Portimão Hospital, with activities planned at health centers in Vila Real de Santo António, Tavira, Albufeira, Loulé, Lagos, Vila do Bispo, and Aljezur until then.
“We’ll end in Portimão, where we hope to make a major exhibition with all the collected data and probably confirm what we suspect, which is the existence of a shortage of 1,500 nurses in the Algarve,” said Guadalupe Simões.
According to the SEP, the nurse shortage in the Algarve is “worsening every day,” in a scenario where “nurses leave every day… without replacement.”
Guadalupe Simões remarked on the peculiarity of the Health Minister having the “sole concern” of discussing a collective labor agreement on work time organization, despite existing legislation on the matter being unenforced due to the nurse shortage.
“This means that what is coming in terms of proposals is nothing good, regarding the reconciliation of personal and family life, hiring of nurses, addressing all these shortages. The Algarve is an example, but nationwide we all know it follows the same pattern,” stated the SEP representative.
Worker representatives emphasize a regulation by the Nurses’ Order (Safe Staffing) that dictates how many nurses should work in each service, yet “unfortunately no service complies with this regulation.”
The union displayed numbers on a mural at the entrance of Faro Hospital, showing a lack of 70 nurses in the intensive care unit and 39 in emergencies, to name just two services.
In Portimão Hospital, according to SEP, there are shortages of 20 nurses in emergencies and 10 in the orthopedics department, among others.
The union also calculated thousands of public holiday leave owed, as well as accumulated overtime hours.
“The trend is for this discomfort to increase, and if that happens, naturally, we will have to do something, namely, decide forms of protest,” said Guadalupe Simões.
