The Ministry of Finance approved on Thursday the document necessary to allow hospitals to proceed with the hiring of nurses and other professionals. The document was signed by the Ministers of Health, Ana Paula Martins, and Finance, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, and was sent for publication in the Official Gazette on an urgent basis.
The approval comes after the Order of Nurses warned on Monday of the existence of about three thousand new nurses available to enter the labor market, while several NHS units continued to report shortages of professionals and could not hire. The president of the Order of Nurses, Luís Filipe Barreira, asked for urgent intervention from the Minister of Health.
The document in question is the Global Reference Framework of the NHS, a planning instrument for three years that serves as the basis for the organizational development plans of local health units. It is a kind of program contract through which each institution defines the activity it plans to carry out and the necessary resources.
The executive director of the NHS, Álvaro Almeida, said that the Executive Directorate did not have the capacity or competence to intervene in the process of ad hoc hiring authorizations, since there was no established circuit. Álvaro Almeida acknowledged that the organizational development plans should have been approved at the beginning of the year, but that this did not happen because the global reference framework had not been approved.
