“It seems certain that we shall not reduce [it] as we would want,” he said. “Despite a much larger offer of family doctors, there is a type of demand [for hospital A&E], which must be studied.”
One answer, he speculated, might be to increase the capacity of primary health care units to resolve problems in a more timely fashion, on the basis that some patients head for hospital because they feel great urgency to resolve a problem.
Last week Público newspaper reported that in the first eight months of this year, 4.3 million patients were registered in hospital A&E departments - a 4.8 percent increase on the same period of last year. The ministry had forecast a 3.7 percent reduction for the year as a whole.
“The good news is that, until August, with an extra 200,000 emergencies recorded, the system responded without any kind of breakdown,” said the minister, adding on the rise in demand that the government is “surprised and ... not satisfied.”