SEP has denounced the worsening of working conditions, the deregulation of working hours, overtime, position reversals, loss of parity between the nursing career and the higher technical career in public administration, non-completion of evaluation processes and absence of measures retention of nurses in the SNS.

“We are announcing the fight plan that we will develop. From the outset, a set of fighting actions, within the scope of all regional directions, throughout the country, and also a national strike on the 10th of November”, the president of SEP, José Carlos Martins, told journalists.

José Carlos Martins warned that if the Ministry of Health does not present solutions by the 10th of November, other forms of struggle will follow.

“The Ministry of Health continues to provide no answers to the points mentioned. It is unacceptable that a year after the publication of the diploma that makes it possible to count points, there are still thousands of nurses who are the target of profound injustices resulting from the failure to counteract these points correctly”, he highlighted.

The union leader stated that there is “a very wide range” of nurses who are unfairly targeted, such as the oldest and most qualified and the specialists who took office in 2010.

According to José Carlos Martins, the guardianship continues to not schedule the negotiation process, with a view to valuing nurses, referring to repairing the parity of the nursing career with the higher technical career in public administration and professionals in parental care, who “did not transition to the category of specialist nurse”.

“We are demanding that the ministry facilitate the hiring of more nurses and the implementation of the precarious links that exist today, because there is a structural lack with very clear evidence in the thousands of overtime hours that nurses are, at the moment, resolving and still we are far from the acute phase of winter”, he observed.

“It is imperative to hire more and fix precarious relationships”, he reinforced.

The last nurses' strike brought together a few dozen of those health professionals, on the 30th of June at the Ministry of Health, in Lisbon, to demand better working conditions.

During the protest, a motion was approved in which the SEP stated that it was “inadmissible and intolerable” that the Ministry of Health continued to fail to respond to nurses' problems.