The 44 emergency and resuscitation medical vehicles (VMER) recorded an inoperability rate of 2.61% in 2025, equivalent to 10,080 hours, 2,427 hours more than in 2024 – representing a growth of 32%.
Between 2017 and 2020, the rate was less than 1%, and then showed an upward trend until last year.
To the the National Institute of Medical Emergency () stated that the numbers are a consequence of the lack of crew, especially doctors.
“The VMERs are manned by medical teams from the hospitals where they are integrated, and it is the responsibility of the hospital to guarantee the scale of human resources allocated to the vehicle”, INEM tells Jornal de Notícias.
The president of the Portuguese Association of Hospital Administrators downplays the increase in the inoperability rate, which he considers “small”. In the same newspaper, Xavier Barreto says that Portugal has “a very good pre-hospital emergency system” and that the problem is concentrated in certain regions, such as the Interior and the Algarve.
