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At the beginning of this month, the Government announced the hiring of another 650 professionals for the SNS24 line, as well as the opening of two new call centers, but the contracts offered to nurses and pharmacists offer a salary of only seven euros per hour, well below what a nurse receives in the National Health Service (SNS).
“At a time when health professionals are fundamental for the country and for the context in which it is located, it is not understood that the intention is to reinforce professionals with precarious conditions and salary degradation,” accuses the Bloco de Esquerda. , whose parliamentary group asked the Government a question in this regard, questioning the Ministry of Health about the amount paid to Altice (the company that owns MEO) for each professional of the SNS24 service.
The professionals hired will have the function of ensuring the remote assistance of users with asymptomatic covid-19, using a computer, a Tablet or one smartphone from home, “in neighborhoods where the SNS 24 does not have a call center.” The MEO operator, which is the entity that manages the line, offers the aforementioned seven euros for each hour of work, in addition to occupational accident insurance and a distance training action lasting one hour, leaving candidates the possibility of choose a shift of four consecutive hours a day, in an interval that covers from 7:00 am to 10:00 pm.
When the request for disclosure of this recruitment operation reached the office of the president of the Ordem dos Enferiros, he says that he refused to disclose it. “If it is by counting pennies they contain alone, because nurses are already giving everything they can give in the NHS”, Ana Rita Cavaco reacted to the PUBLIC, to add: “The value they offer is not acceptable, there are countries that offer the three times the salary of nurses, with a house and contract, and, as I have been told, many of those who applied are being called to work in call centers and not at home as advertised “.
The president also added that the president of the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS), responsible for the SNS24 Line, Luís Goes Pinheiro, will have agreed that “these are not attractive conditions for nurses” and will have been willing to try. negotiate with the operator the respective improvement. For the PUBLIC, the SPMS limited itself to maintaining, however, that “the SPMS and professional bodies are not part of the health professional contracts of the SNS24, so their intervention is limited to promoting the dissemination of job opportunities.”
In October, the Secretary of State for Health, Diogo Serras Lopes, promised that the 650 new professionals of the SNS24 Line would start working in the autumn. Adding to the 1,350 professionals who already work there, that line would have more than two thousand professionals, which would guarantee, from the outset, the reduction of service waiting times in a service that reaches 300 thousand monthly contacts. during the pandemic. Since the beginning of November, the SNS24 Line has also begun to issue provisional statements of prophylactic isolation to people who have contacted people infected with the new coronavirus to justify absences from work.
The Ordem dos Farmacêuticos chose to publicize the hiring action, but insisted on distancing itself from the proposed conditions. “The Order has no participation in the contractual and remuneration conditions offered to pharmaceutical candidates,” reads its website.
Questions about the conditions offered to nurses to work in the fight against the pandemic are not limited to the SNS24 Line. In another question, the parliamentary group BE questions the Ministry of Health about the fact that Hospital García de Orta is using a temporary work company to hire nurses to work with patients with covid-19 in emergency services and care. Hospital intensive care units. These contracts will be carried out for 35 hours a week, paid at 8.5 euros per hour. “Strengthening the SNS cannot and should not be temporary,” accuses the BE, who wants to know if this practice is being replicated in other hospitals. “The amount they pay to nurses could be higher if they chose to stop losing money with intermediaries”, reacted, in turn, the president of the Ordem dos Enferiros.
