“It is a wrong decision that must be reversed,” demands the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) in a statement sent to Agência Lusa.
The administration of the ULS of Coimbra, headed by Alexandre Lourenço, decided that the Emergency Service of the General Hospital, commonly known as Hospital dos Covões, would from today become a clinical service center.
This change dictates that the General Hospital will now handle acute non-emergent situations and only receives patients referred by the SNS24 Line or other hospital units, as stated by the ULS of Coimbra.
In the PCP’s view, this decision by the ULS de Coimbra administration “serving the government of PSD/CDS” recalls “the first closure attempt in 2012,” which the party also opposed.
For the PCP, “the number of users covered by the area served by this hospital justifies maintaining the full operation of the Hospital dos Covões emergency services,” emphasizing that “emergencies are not excesses, not redundancies, not waste.”
“Excesses, redundancies, and waste are public-private partnerships in health, the convention of services that can be offered by public services, private hiring of diagnostic means when there is capacity in the public sector,” states the PCP.
This decision, according to the party, “cannot be separated from the destructive merger of the Coimbra Hospital Centers that created the CHUC, decided in 2010 during the PS government and implemented from 2011 by the PSD/CDS Government, continued by successive governments.”
This led to “the closure of many specialties, which was deepened by the last absolute majority PS government with the creation of the ULS, which became an extraordinarily large and difficult-to-manage structure with a vast area of influence.”
“The insistence on this measure, 13 years later, demonstrates that the central objective of the PSD/CDS governments’ policy is the underinvestment and disarticulation of the NHS, thus paving the way for the thriving business of disease,” asserts the PCP.
According to the PCP, sending patients to the central emergency service of CHUC “is not a solution, it will only contribute to the increasing chaotic and overcrowded situations in the services, degrading care conditions and favoring the business” of disease.
