The decision regarding the minimum services was made by the Arbitration Tribunal this Friday.
Among the services that must be maintained during the general strike day are “emergency situations, as well as all those situations that could result in irreparable/irreversible harm or difficult to repair circumstances, medically justified”.
Minimum services cover operating rooms in emergency services, inpatient services that operate continuously, and home hospitalizations, as well as palliative care, intensive care, hemodialysis, and oncological treatments based on priority.
The procedures necessary for voluntary termination of pregnancy to meet the legal term, organ collection and transplantation, and medically assisted reproduction procedures, if non-execution could damage the procedure, are also covered.
Intervention radiology on a precautionary basis, treatment of chronic patients using biological products, administration of drugs to chronic patients and/or on an outpatient basis, irreplaceable parenteral nutrition services and immunohematology services connected to blood donors are included in the minimum services.
Continuation of treatments such as chemotherapy programs, radiotherapy or nuclear medicine, as well as the complementary services crucial for these services (medications, diagnostic tests, collections, sterilization) are “strictly necessary”.
Treatments with daily prescriptions on an outpatient basis (like dressings) and treatment of complex wounds are also considered minimum services, along with services aimed at breastfeeding.
As for the workers needed to comply with the minimum services in each health unit, it has been determined they must be equivalent to those scheduled on Sundays and holidays in each shift (morning, afternoon, night).
The arbitration tribunal also states that health units can only resort to workers who join the strike if non-striking workers are insufficient for the minimum services.
In this decision, the workers’ side arbitrator, lawyer Filipe Lamelas, disagreed, considering the minimum services too extensive.
His voting explanation is that as there is already a definition of minimum services in the collective medical agreements, defining minimal services beyond those for other professionals—mainly nurses and technicians—renders them impractical in many cases.
“Ultimately, in the current ruling, minimum services are decreed for activities and/or services that will not operate because there is no same obligation for minimum service provision by doctors in these activities and/or services,” reads the document available at CES.
Regarding the workers defined to ensure minimum services, Filipe Lamelas also disagreed, arguing an Agreement on Minimum Services, including with the Ministry of Health’s General Secretariat, foresees that during a general strike, the workers equal only those scheduled “on Sundays, during the night shift, in the normal holiday season”.
“In this sense, even if the court felt it was its duty to comment on the necessary means to guarantee the provision of minimum services in the general strike in question—which seems debatable—it should never have done it differently than what is stated there,” stated the workers’ side arbitrator.
The CGTP and UGT decided to call for a general strike on December 11, in response to the draft law on labor legislation reform presented by the Government.
This will be the first stoppage to unite both union federations since June 2013, when Portugal was under the ‘troika’ intervention.
