The strike by pharmacists of the National Health Service (SNS) this Tuesday had a participation of 92% nationwide, according to the National Union of Pharmacists (SNF).
“The peak is recorded in Madeira, with 96%” of members, the president of the union, Henrique Reguengo, told the Lusa agency, reporting on the meetings held this Tuesday in Coimbra and Lisbon, to give substance to the discontent of these professionals.
Pharmacists are in strike between this Tuesday and Thursdayto question the stalemate in negotiations with the guardianship, after a meeting scheduled for the beginning of the month was postponed. According to the union structure, pharmacists feel discriminated against doctors and nurses.
In reaction to the strike, the president of the Order of Pharmacists (OF) warned this Tuesday that the best professionals in this field are leaving the SNS, causing a situation in hospitals that It will take decades to recover.
“The best pharmacists, because they have much more interesting alternatives outside the SNS, are abandoning the SNS and we are creating a situation that will not be able to recover even in the coming decades,” Hélder Mota Filipe told Lusa, on the first of the three days Strike of professionals in public health units.
The president stressed that “only someone without the capacity to understand could disagree” with the strike of SNS pharmacists, claiming that this is a class that “has not seen an updated salary scale since 1999.”
Hélder Mota Filipe left “a call for attention to the Government” for the situation in which the SNS pharmacists have arrived, which “will never allow the SNS hospitals to function correctly.”
“No developed country has hospitals functioning correctly without guaranteeing the circuit of medicines and the proper use of medicines,” defended the president, highlighting that pharmacists are currently also asked for greater intervention, taking into account the constant therapeutic innovation and the emergence of highly complex drugs.
“I don’t know how they want to reconcile the precarious, even inhumane, situation of how pharmacists are treated in the NHS with modern hospitals that guarantee the quality of care in the situation we live in,” lamented the head of the OF.
After highlighting that the role of the order is to guarantee quality care to patients, Hélder Mota Filipe stated that the issue is a profession that has many alternativesgiving the example of professionals “involved in clinical trials in the NHS, who go to private hospitals or companies that develop” this type of activity.
Hélder Mota Filipe also maintained that, compared to medications that cost millions of euros per treatment, the savings that the intervention of pharmacists can generate “They pay to update their career and hire more” other professionals for the SNS.
In statements to Lusa at the beginning of the month, Henrique Reguengo stated that pharmaceutical intervention is increasingly complex and necessary and that, in this way, the SNS will have fewer and fewer people interested in the profession, highlighting that some trainees are already leaving .
“Pharmacists, for now, have 100% employability. If they don’t come to the SNS, they go somewhere else where they get paid what they deserve.“, he concluded.
Source: Observadora
