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Marta Temido, Portuguese Minister of Health, resigned on Tuesday following the death of a pregnant Indian tourist. The latter, in the 30th week of pregnancy, had suffered a heart attack during a transfer between two hospitals in Lisbon, because in the first of her, the Santa Maria, the neonatology ward was full.
Portugal has to manage in recent months a serious shortage of doctors and nurses in hospitals, especially in the gynecology and obstetrics wards. This situation has caused emergency measures decided by the Ministry of Health, such as the closure of the wards of some hospitals on weekends and during the holidays due to lack of staff. These measures, approved by Minister Temido, had been strongly criticized, also because they sometimes force pregnant women to take longer and riskier journeys to reach a hospital. In recent months, serious episodes had already occurred, such as the death of two newborns whose mothers had been subjected to transfers and long waits.
The 34-year-old Indian tourist was hospitalized on Tuesday for high blood pressure and difficulty in breathing: after being stabilized, her transfer was decided due to “an objective lack of space in the neonatal ward”. During the journey she had suffered a heart attack, and upon arrival in the new facility, the child was born by caesarean section: mother and son had been transferred to the intensive care units, but the woman died on Saturday.
The news caused great controversy in the Portuguese press and media, which for some time have been very attentive to the problems of the national health system. In recent months, some hospitals and over a thousand doctors had presented the so-called “refusal of responsibility” to denounce the poor working conditions to which the staff of public facilities are subjected. This situation had strongly affected the popularity of Minister Temido, who on Tuesday resigned her “aware that the conditions no longer exist to continue in her role”.
Marta Temido, 48, was previously considered one of the rising figures within the Portuguese Socialist Party, which won the elections again in 2022 by obtaining an absolute majority of the seats. She had been Minister of Health since 2018, first as an independent, chosen for her great experience in the sector, then as a leader of the Socialist Party, which she joined in 2021.
After the success of the vaccination campaign, she had been nominated as leaders and elected in the general elections of January 2022 for the Socialist Party of Prime Minister Antonio Costa, who on Tuesday accepted his resignation, expressing his “sincere thanks for the work done in a period so hard “.
Temido’s handling of the medical personnel crisis has been the subject of major attacks not only by the opposition press, but also by many trade representatives. One of the latest reasons for the conflict had been the phone calls from Minister Temido, reported by the newspaper Observerto some hospital managers with invitations to cancel the holidays of doctors and nurses.
In an interview on 25 August Temido had defined the problems of the health system “a result not of the choices of today, yesterday or last year, but of those of the Eighties”. According to Temido, the cause of the shortage of medical personnel would be above all the excessive difficulty in accessing university courses in medicine in those years.