The minimum health services for the general strike on December 11th, Thursday, include emergency situations, chemotherapy, palliative care and bandages, according to the decision of the Arbitration Court of the Economic and Social Council (CES).
Among the services that must be provided on the day of the general strike are “emergency situations, as well as all those situations that could result in irreparable/irreversible damage or that are difficult to repair, medically substantiated”.
The minimum services are covered by operating rooms in emergency services, inpatient services that operate on a permanent basis and home hospitalizations, as well as palliative care, intensive care, hemodialysis and oncological treatments depending on priority.
Are still covered procedures for voluntary termination of pregnancy essential to comply with the legal termination deadlinelike this collection of organs and transplants and medically assisted procreation procedures, if failure to do so would result in harm to the procedure.
Interventional radiology on a preventive basis, treatment of chronically ill patients using the administration of biological products, the administration of drugs to chronically ill and/or outpatient patients, urgent parenteral nutrition services and immunohemotherapy services linked to blood donors are also part of the minimum services.
Still under minimum services will be the continuation of treatments such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy or nuclear medicine programsas well as the complementary services that are essential to the performance of these services (medicines, diagnostic tests, collections, sterilization), “as strictly as necessary”.
Treatments with daily prescriptions on an outpatient basis (such as bandages) and treatment of complex wounds will also be minimum services, as will services intended for breastfeeding.
As for workers to fulfill the minimum services in each health unit, it was defined that they will have to be the equivalent to those scheduled on Sunday and holidays in each shift (morning, afternoon, night).
The arbitration court also states that, for minimum services, health units They can only turn to workers who join the strike if there are not enough workers who do not join the strike.
In this decision, the arbitrator on the workers’ side, lawyer Filipe Lamelas, had an unsuccessful vote – that is, he did not agree with the decision -, as he considered that the minimum services were too comprehensive.
One of the arguments in your declaration of vote is that as there is already a definition of minimum services in the collective contracting of doctors, the definition of minimum services above those for other professionals – especially nurses and technicians – means that they are not practicable in many cases.
“Ultimately, in this ruling, minimum services are decreed for activities and/or services that will not work because there is not the same obligation to provide minimum services for doctors in these activities and/or services”, reads the document available at CES.
Regarding the workers defined to ensure minimum services, Filipe Lamelas also disagreed and claimed that there is a Minimum Services Agreement, established even with the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Health, which provides that in a general strike the workers are equivalent only to those scheduled “on Sunday, on the night shift, during the normal holiday season”.
“In this sense, even if the court understood that it was its obligation to rule on the means necessary to guarantee the provision of minimum services in the general strike in question – which seems debatable – it should never do so in different terms contained therein”, stated the arbitrator for the worker’s side.
The CGTP and the UGT decided to call a general strike for December 11th, in response to the draft law to reform labor legislation, presented by the Government.
This will be the first strike to bring together the two unions since June 2013, when Portugal was under intervention by the ‘troika’.