FNAM denounces “errors, failures and delays” in payments to family health teams – Society

This Tuesday, the National Federation of Doctors denounced “failures, errors and delays” in the payment to family doctors and other members of family health teams and contested the changes introduced, which eliminate weighting by age.

In a statement, the National Federation of Doctors (FNAM) states that the generalization of the Local Health Units (ULS) model and the extinction of Regional Health Administrations (ARS) “are causing failures, errors and delays” in payments and points out non-compliance with the Family Health Units (USF) law.

According to FNAM, the decision conveyed through the channels of the Central Health System Administration (ACSS) at the end of April that the processing of salaries will only take into account the number of users, without any consideration for the ages of users, means that professionals of units with an older population “may not receive the supplement (…) to which they are entitled”.

The federation justifies that this change “not only contradicts the decisions of the previous Minister of Health, at the negotiating table, but also puts at risk the generalization of the USF model, with the quality and satisfaction of users and professionals who were the prerogative of this model”.

Weighting by age allows calculating the workload that a given population will produce for the healthcare team that assists them, i.e., a population with more users at the extremes of age gives rise to more consultations, as it requires greater surveillance and care. .

The FNAM considers that the change introduced “is serious and will result in injustice in the salaries of family doctors (…), with immediate consequences for the assistance capacity of primary health care in Portugal”.

Remember that the weighting of user lists by age has been in force since the first USF began operating in 2006, is set out in decree-law and should remain unchanged “until any new weighting is ethically and scientifically validated”.

The federation also demands “immediate rectification” of the rules for attributing the supplement associated with the increase in the list of users, namely the attribution of the supplement to family doctors “with lists greater than 1,917 weighted units”.

In the note released this Tuesday, the FNAM considers that the abolition of quotas for the formation of new USF model B (with payment by objectives) at national level, in 2024, “was an essential step to provide better health care and a family doctor to all residents in Portugal”.

He also recalls that he always warned the previous Government that the generalization of USF model B “should be done in order to guarantee the quality of the health care provided”, particularly with regard to accessibility and satisfaction of users and professionals.