At 18:00 today, the average waiting time for urgent patients exceeded 10 hours at Fernando Fonseca hospital (Amadora-Sintra), and was almost 6 hours at Santa Maria, in Lisbon.
According to data from the National Health Service Portal, consulted by the Lusa agency, 27 patients with a yellow (urgent) bracelet were in the general emergency service at Fernando Fonseca Hospital (Amadora-Sintra) at 6pm today, with an average waiting time of 10 hours and 09 minutes, when the recommended time is 60 minutes.
In this unit, three people with orange wristbands, i.e. very urgent patients (recommended time of 10 minutes) were waiting with a waiting time of 03 hours and 23 minutes.
In the general emergency department of Lisbon’s Santa Maria hospital, the average waiting time was 5 hours and 54 minutes, with 23 people wearing yellow wristbands.
There, too, the waiting time for users with orange wristbands was over 3 hours, as was the case at the Beatriz Ângelo Hospital in Loures, where another 53 people were waiting with yellow wristbands, with a waiting time of 4 hours and 23 minutes.
In the emergency department at São José hospital, there were 18 people with yellow wristbands, with a waiting time of 03 hours and 43 minutes, while at São Francisco Xavier the average waiting time was 01 hour and 09 minutes, with six people with yellow wristbands in the emergency department.
At Garcia de Orta hospital, the waiting time was one hour and 37 minutes (18 people).
At the D. Estefânia pediatric hospital, the waiting time was 45 minutes, with eight people waiting in the emergency department.
In the Porto region, waiting times were substantially lower and the longest was at São João, where 48 people waited an average of 2 hours and 20 minutes.
At Santo António, the waiting time was 1 hour and 23 minutes (14 people).
At the Eduardo Santos Silva hospital in Vila Nova de Gaia, nine people with yellow wristbands were waiting in the multipurpose emergency room, with a waiting time of 1 hour and 22 minutes, while at Pedro Hispano, in Matosinhos, the waiting time for urgent patients was 2 hours and 41 minutes (five people).
The data presented on the National Health Service Portal refers to the average waiting time for care in the last two hours and the number of patients presented illustrates the people who are currently waiting for care, after triage.
The Manchester triage, which makes it possible to assess the patient’s clinical risk and assign a degree of priority, includes five levels: emergent (red bracelet), very urgent (orange), urgent (yellow), not very urgent (green) and non-urgent (blue).
In the case of yellow wristbands, the first service should not take longer than 60 minutes, and in the case of green wristbands, the recommendation is that it should not take longer than 120 minutes (two hours).