Jornal de Leiria – SNS management prevents patients with breast cancer from being treated at Caldas da Rainha Hospital

The executive of the Caldas da Rainha City Council is against a decision by the Executive Board of the SNS that prevents quality treatment for people with breast cancer at the Caldas Hospital.

For 40 years, the Caldas da Rainha Unit at Centro Hospitalar do Oeste has been treating patients with breast oncological pathology and has been requalified with equipment and clinical technicians, including access to a plastic surgeon.

Now, however, you cannot treat breast cancer based on a single criterion: the number of occurrences per year.

“People cannot be treated as numbers. Hospital de Caldas maintains a team dedicated to breast cancer, managing to provide answers to users within a week, both in terms of consultations, treatments and surgeries”, says the president from the municipality, Vítor Marques.

The mayor, in a statement, noted that the Caldas da Rainha unit has an installed capacity that allows it to perform around 150 surgeries annually.

“With this absolutely inexplicable order of impediment on the part of the SNS, which is based only on criteria of quantity and not quality, patients will have to be moved to the IPO in Lisbon, with the problems that are already known, ending up entering a long waiting list that can go beyond two months for simple consultations, diagnoses, or treatments and surgeries.”

Vítor Marques states that “this is another episode of the Ministry of Health’s disregard for the inhabitants of our region, after the hasty decision to close the current Caldas Hospital over time.”

He adds that the construction of the future Centro Hospitalar do Oeste will take at least 10 years – and taking into account the need to provide the current Hospital with the best conditions to provide an adequate response to the needs of the population – the City Council has advanced with 725 thousand euros of a project with a total public investment value of 1 million and 300 thousand euros for the rehabilitation of Maternity and Obstetrics services in Caldas.

“Today it has some of the best conditions in the country, but it is the only maternity hospital with an obstetrics service nationwide that has the emergency room closed four days a week due to the NHS’s difficulty in finding clinical human resources, whether doctors or other necessary professionals.”

“We already have one of the best pediatrics in the country and we also hope that this investment will be taken into account in the decision of the Minister of Health, Manuel Pizarro, regarding the location of the new CHO. As everyone knows, we argue that it should be in the Caldas and Óbidos region”.