Professionals are abandoning palliative units over others that are better paid and receive incentives for performance.
Community Support Teams in Palliative Care (ECSCP), responsible for providing home assistance to advanced patients, face a increasing loss of doctors and nurses For other health units, more attractive in salary and incentive terms.
The alert was formalized in a Open Letter sent to the Ministry of Healthexecutive direction of the NHS, Assembly of the Republic and parliamentary groups, signed by more than a hundred professionals.
The document, promoted by the doctor Tânia Caeiro, coordinator of the team of Cascais, and subscribed by elements of more than 20 of the 33 existing teams, defends the ECSCP transformation into functional units. This change would allow the contractualization of objectives with access to remuneration incentives, similar to what happens in family health units, explains the.
According to the signatories, the absence of specific measures for these teams aggravated a significant wage asymmetry, especially after the incentives created in 2024 for other areas of primary health care. “We have been attending the departure of doctors and nurses due to lower working conditions”, Says the letter.
The lack of means is not new. The Portuguese Palliative Care Observatory had already pointed out, in 2023, that only 36% of teams They had at least one full -time doctor. In addition, at the end of this year, the national coverage of these answers was limited to 53%, and some ECSCP did not even meet the minimum requirements to function.
The National Federation of Doctors (FNAM) joined criticism, denouncing inequality of treatment and unworthy working conditions. The Federation claims CONCERTIZATION OF THE RESOLUTION Approved in February by the Assembly of the Republic, which recommended reinforcing community palliative care. Both the Order of Doctors and the Portuguese Palliative Care Association have already manifested favorable to the creation of functional units.
In response, the SNS Executive Directorate has merely reported that the exhibition will be sent to the future National Palliative Care Commission, a body that has been without leadership for over a year.
