The Union of Pre-Hospital Emergency Technicians (STEPH) praised the Minister of Health, Ana Paula Martins, this Sunday for being the “first government official” to undertake implementing measures at INEM and showing political will to resolve existing problems.
“The current Minister of Health, (…) in addition to recognizing the undeniable weaknesses of the medical emergency system, is the first government official to make a written commitment to implement measures and solutions”, says STEPH in a statement.
“For the first time in a long time, we are witnessing an apparent political will in the structural and definitive resolution of long-existing constraints”, he adds.
In the union’s opinion, “a fundamental and decisive step has been taken to begin reversing the degradation of emergency medical services”.
In the statement, STEPH recalls that it has been warning for several years about “the state of degradation of emergency medical services” in Portugal and the “countless occurrences in which aid to citizens has failed”.
He also states that he “never gave up” and that he took the matter to the previous INEM board of directors, to successive Ministries of Health or to the various parliamentary groups, having been received by the Secretary of State for Health Management, Cristina Vaz Tomé, in June this year.
For STEPH, “despite one or another detailed measure, nothing essential has changed in INEM’s response capacity” and there has been “a degradation at a high rate, a situation that was completely avoidable”.
The union also states that the departure of around 500 pre-hospital emergency technicians over the last six years contributed to this degradation, which “had a high cost in human lives that were lost”.
In the statement, the union highlights that the recent cases of people who died while waiting for assistance from INEM “do not differ from the several widely denounced” by the union and recalls that, between 2021 and 2023, it “incessantly denounced several occurrences in which failures in the aid had tragic outcomes for several citizens.”
“Over the last few years, we have unfortunately seen the degradation of INEM and its response capacity and now, also thanks to the intervention of this union, we see some hope of improvement in the future”, he argues, adding that pre-hospital emergency technicians will continue to “give the best response humanly possible with the resources they have”.
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