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The Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Norte, to which the Santa María and Pulido Valente hospitals belong, signed protocols with five units from the private and social sector, allowing patients to be operated by their surgeons outside the hospital. The plan is that by the end of January, a maximum of 500 patients on the waiting list for various specialties can be operated on. The first surgeries on this model are scheduled for this Wednesday.
“The objective of this project is not so much to prevent the waiting list from growing, because even in a pandemic we have managed to shorten the list – at the beginning of the year we had 10,000 patients on the list and now we have 8,000 – but rather to make time for wait is not expanded. We want to test this negative effect that was felt in the first phase of the pandemic ”, explains to the PUBLIC the president of the board of directors of the Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Norte (CHLN) Daniel Ferro. Although the wait time varies according to priorities and specialties, the global average is six months.
For the signed protocols, which come into effect this Wednesday with the surgery of seven patients, the CHLN took as a reference the values that the NHS pays to public hospitals for the same care. Of the seven main private and social sector hospitals consulted in Lisbon, five accepted the proposal. The patients who are going to be operated on are considered non-priority cases – urgent and priority cases are intervened in the hospital center – whose waiting does not imply a risk of life but which affects their quality.
“If it were not for this alternative, we would have about 500 patients who would not be operated at risk of degrading the quality of life of patients and their families. Only hospital surgeons will go to these registered hospitals. The rest of the equipment and everything necessary will be provided by these units ”, says Daniel Ferro, adding that if necessary, the protocols can be renewed.
Seven specialized surgeries
The solution responds to the need to organize the services forced by the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. As the number of hospitalized patients with covid increased and it was also necessary to expand intensive care units to support the most serious patients, it was necessary to mobilize space and professionals for these areas, with direct implications on the ability to respond to patients no covid. The mechanism found to mitigate this impact is also being used by other public hospitals, such as García de Orta, in Almada, and Amadora-Sintra.
For now there are interventions in seven specialties: cardiac, neurosurgery, vascular surgery, ENT, plastic surgery, urology and orthopedics ”, says the president of the board of directors, giving some examples of patients that can be operated under these protocols: neurosurgery situations of herniated disc, in orthopedics, problems related to the hip or knees, in urology they can be prostate hypertrophy, in plastic surgery they will be breast reconstructions ”.
The choice of patients follows the criteria of the waiting list, that is, they would be patients who under normal conditions would see their surgery scheduled during these months, and the option attracts the majority of patients. “Patients continue to be operated on by their doctor. Patients view this solution with optimism. Adherence to the SIGIC voucher for surgery [Sistema Integrado de Gestão de Inscritos para Cirurgia] it does not exceed 15% and in this case of the patients contacted, almost 100% accepted the solution ”, says Daniel Ferro.
