Since Wednesday, INEM employees – a structure that has less than half the number of members than required – have been on overtime strike to ask for a career review and better salary conditions, a situation that is creating several problems in emergency services.

“I don’t know if the impact of INEM’s lack of response stems from the strike. For years, we have been telling citizens that every time they need help from the medical field, they should call 112 and they will be assisted by an urgent patient guidance center”, but “it turns out that, suddenly, this situation has collapsed for about of four or five days”, the president of LBP, António Nunes.

Faced with the lack of response, Antonio Nunes said, “many of the citizens who needed help, unable to be attended to by a call center, called the fire department directly and some have even gone directly to fire stations”.

In response, the firefighters, “within their principle that they are the first and last line of the entire system, served their populations and their communities as they always do and transported people to the hospital, without them being part of the system”.

The “triage between urgent and non-urgent patients or urgent and emergent patients is no longer being carried out because not even the firefighters are able to contact the Urgent Patient Guidance Center (CODU) to receive guidance on which hospital they should go to”, thus favouring the units in their areas, said the leader.

For Antonio Nunes, “it is hardly acceptable that INEM does not have a plan B for a situation like this, whatever its nature”, which worsens the existing problems.

“We have been complaining for a long time that when we have patients in ambulances, CODU sometimes takes more than half an hour to tell us which hospital we have to go to”, recalls António Nunes, considering that the system “is not adequate for the expectations of patients”, especially in a “complex organisation” of response.

On Monday, the strike by pre-hospital care technicians forced the stoppage of 44 emergency services in the country during the afternoon shift, worsening delays.

Samu has already confirmed the impact of the strike and recommended that people not hang up before their calls are answered.

The European emergency number 112 should only be called “in serious or life-threatening situations”, and the institute highlights that it is “important that the caller does not disconnect the call until a professional has answered, as these are always served on a first-come, first-served basis.”

“If the call is on hold, people should wait for the call to be answered by CODU professionals, instead of hanging up and calling again”.

According to Samu, 28 calls that are not medical emergencies are answered per hour, 18% of the total calls received at the centre.