President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa addressed the importance of the National Health Service (SNS) at the closing of a conference marking 50 years of the Periphery Medical Service (SMP) at ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa.
The head of state emphasized that the current state of healthcare in Portugal “requires serious consideration of primary care” and highlighted the crucial role of the SNS network at this level.
“In primary care, despite all its issues, the public network of the SNS, even when it faces flaws caused by various circumstances, has experience and a tradition that other sectors will struggle to match immediately. This is not ideological; it’s reality,” he stated.
The President pointed out that “the idea of basic care being easily shared, like training, with other health sectors, is still idealistic, if not unrealistic, even today.”
“The ability of other sectors to basically train healthcare professionals in certain specific areas and with certain responsibilities or complexities is still very limited and will remain so for a while. It’s natural, not a criticism. It takes time,” he noted.
Earlier, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa discussed the possibility of “associating public and private sectors with primary care, through concessions and partnerships,” admitting that private entities might not be interested “because they lack the resources, they aren’t yet scaled for it, they are still earlier in the process.”
The head of state warned that “without the strengthening of primary care, which is always desirable and has been attempted in various ways, but without that reinforcement, adapted to the country’s demographic evolution and mobility, everything will fall on other healthcare realities, particularly hospitals.”
Regarding the SNS, the President linked its “specific, singular role” to Portugal’s reality: “This is because Portugal is an aging country. It’s because Portugal has between two and two and a half million people living in poverty, which fluctuates with crises.”
“Portugal, even with the very rapid evolution of private health insurance, doesn’t even have half of the population covered by these insurances – not to mention that many of these insurances do not cover the most complex and demanding healthcare,” he added.
