The Caldas da Rainha City Council and the ‘I Speak for Your Health’ movement are encouraging citizens to send postcards to the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister in favor of building the new West Hospital in the municipality.
The promoters intend to send out 200 postcards a day and are promoting the initiative “through actions at various events, in parish councils and other places in the municipality”, the local authority said in a press release issued today.
This municipality in the district of Leiria today joined the initiative, launched two weeks ago by the movement, to “encourage the involvement of citizens in other initiatives to defend the location of the new Hospital do Oeste in Caldas da Rainha/Óbidos”.
Two weeks ago, the “I Speak for Your Health” movement began distributing free postcards to be written by the population and sent to the Prime Minister, António Costa, and the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
The movement has been promoting various protest actions against the Ministry of Health’s decision to build the new Hospital do Oeste in Bombarral, such as a slow march of vehicles in July.
In November, the Comunidade Intermunicipal do Oeste delivered a study commissioned from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa to help the government decide on the location of the new hospital, a document that pointed to Bombarral, a municipality next to Óbidos, as the ideal location.
In March of this year, the Caldas da Rainha and Óbidos councils submitted a technical opinion to the minister contesting the criteria used in the study, arguing that other criteria should be taken into account and that the location of the new hospital should be at the confluence of those two municipalities.
In June, the minister announced that the new hospital would be built at Quinta do Falcão, in Bombarral, replacing the three current hospitals of the Centro Hospitalar do Oeste: Caldas da Rainha, Peniche and Torres Vedras.
These units have a catchment area made up of these municipalities and those of Óbidos, Bombarral (both in the district of Leiria), Cadaval and Lourinhã (in the district of Lisbon) and part of the municipalities of Alcobaça (Leiria) and Mafra (Lisbon), covering 298,390 inhabitants.
