“This is not a closure, it is a requalification of the clinical care center,” said Henrique Alexandrino, who advocated for a “restructuring of health professionals’ schedules” to provide a “more adequate response” to users.
He emphasized that “the greatest resource of institutions is their professionals, and this should not be seen as devaluation, quite the contrary.”
“A careful management of resources with respect for public service rules is being implemented,” stated Henrique Alexandrino.
The director of the emergency service at ULS de Coimbra explained this “requalification” of the General Hospital (HG), commonly called Hospital dos Covões, noting that it already had this care but was more limited, attending only 15 patients per day.
In a press release sent this morning, the ULS de Coimbra administration, led by Alexandre Lourenço, justified the decision to convert the General Hospital’s Emergency Service into a clinical care center from today.
“Following the analysis of the activity profile of the HG emergency service, which recorded between 10 to 15 daily attendances, compared to an average of 450 daily attendances at the Emergency Service of the University Hospitals of Coimbra,” it justified.
With this change, HG dos Covões will handle acute non-emergency situations and only receive users referred by the SNS24 Line or other hospital units, indicated ULS de Coimbra in a statement.
The director of the ULS de Coimbra emergency service further stated that maintaining the emergency service at HG “would require daily use of resources, both human and material, which could be concentrated” at the University Hospitals of Coimbra (HUC).
Therefore, he emphasized, users “should always call 112 in case of an emergency or urgent situation, or the SNS24 Line, which will perform the triage and direct the patient to the most suitable service” as needed.
When asked if the HUC emergency service would be overwhelmed, given that they receive users from the entire Centro region and not just locally, Henrique Alexandrino did not believe it would be.
“The HG attended up to 15 patients per day, and as a clinical care center (CAC), it has the capacity to attend up to 32. In other words, we have almost doubled the response for less urgent patients,” he argued.
With this approach, he continued, ULS is “rationalizing, gaining response capacity for less urgent patients with the creation of the CAC, concentrating” at HUC “truly emergent and urgent patients.”
In the view of this official, with this restructuring, there is “an education about what is urgent, because not all acute situations need to be attended to by an emergency service.”
In this sense, he argued that “it is also a matter of health literacy, and it is important for people to understand that there are situations that do not need to be seen in the emergency room, and through the SNS24 Line, it is possible to distinguish these situations.”
Henrique Alexandrino also made it “clear that no user will be left without support, but the clinical care center will also be rigorous in complying with the rules,” which require a prior call to the Health Line 24.
