The comments came as it emerged that 28 of 33 department heads at the hospital had submitted their resignations en masse, citing the lack of a strategy to avoid the “continuous deterioration in working conditions” there.
“We’re not hiding the truth,” Luís Cunha Ribeiro said at a news conference called on Tuesday in response to reports of the resignations. “It’s only thanks to an enormous effort by professionals, whether doctors, nurses or technicians, that we can respond to a situation that we weren’t used to.
“The number of patients going to the emergency department has not increased, but we have more serious patients, older patients, more patients interned and more patients staying more time in the hospital,” the authority’s president explained.
More doctors are needed, he stressed, but there are not enough in Portugal in some specialities.
However, he dismissed the suggestion that there had been any deterioration in the quality of care, over and beyond what resulted from patients staying longer - that is, a lack of beds, which he admitted was a “grave problem”.
Portugal’s national health service has in recent years been particularly squeezed as a result of the austerity policies entailed by its euro-zone bailout, while the demands from an ageing population continue to grow.