Ana Paula Martins holds the future of the SNS Executive Board in her hands | Health

Ana Paula Martins, 58 years old, makes her debut in a government position, but has a diverse professional, academic and business career, despite always having assumed a reserved stance, even when she was president of the Order of Pharmacists, between 2016 and 2021. In January, in his speech at the Democratic Alliance convention, he said that, “after 22 years of discreet activism in the PSD”, he had accepted to be a candidate for deputy to the Assembly of the Republic in what he then considered to be “the biggest challenge” of his life. life.

From now on, he will face a much more complex challenge and oversee one of the Government’s most sensitive portfolios. His name was the most talked about for the leadership of the Ministry of Health since the end of 2023, when he resigned from his position as president of the board of directors of the Centro Hospitalar Universitário de Lisboa Norte (CHULN), where he remained for less than a year. .

At the time, he explained that he left because he disagreed with the inclusion of university hospital centers in the new organizational model of the National Health Service (local health units, which combine hospitals and health centers), the “great reform” of the sector, in the words of the executive director, Fernando Araújo, who had chosen her to direct one of the largest hospitals in the country.

The choice of Ana Paula Martins – It was Araújo’s first appointment to manage a hospital center – It then came as a real surprise, as I had never performed hospital management roles and was a member of the PSD. – He was vice-president of the party for a few months, when the leader was Rui Rio. Before that, he had had brief forays into politics – she was deputy to the Deputy Minister and Parliamentary Affairs, between 1992 and 1993, and deputy to the Minister of Education, in the following two years.

When he arrived at the largest university hospital center in Lisbon, he came from the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences in Portugal, where he was responsible for government affairs. With a degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Lisbon, where she was an assistant professor for two decades, Ana Paula Martins directed the Center for Pharmacoepidemiology Studies of the National Pharmacy Association, from 1994 to 2006, and was part of the task force for the assessment of health technologies on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry association (Apifarma), among multiple functions.

As Minister of Health, the future of the Executive Directorate of the SNS (DE-SNS) and the reforms already initiated, such as the generalization of Local Health Units, the reorganization of hospital emergencies and the universalization of Health Units, are in your hands. Family (USF) model B​. In the electoral program, the Democratic Alliance proposed “a profound change” in the organic structure and functional competencies of the body led by Fernando Araújo.

In a recent interview with the specialized magazine Healthnews, Ana Paula Martins gave some clues about what she intends to do. He said that it is “need to understand what the perspectives are, the means it has and what the work model it envisages in its statutes” and also “question the SNS network about how it evaluates the performance” of DE-SNS. And she assured: what “needs to be corrected will be corrected” and what “is working well is to continue”.

With 60 days to approve the emergency plan for the SNS that the Democratic Alliance committed to in the electoral program, it will have to outline how to implement the risky promises of providing a family doctor to every citizen by the end of 2025, reduce waiting lists for surgeries and consultations and restore the motivation of healthcare professionals.