The Northern Doctors' Union warned that several public hospitals are forcing doctors to perform administrative tasks of coding diagnoses, mainly for funding purposes, taking away their time to treat patients. This situation is occurring in NHS hospitals in Braga, Bragança, Gaia, Feira, Matosinhos, Porto and Viana do Castelo, both in emergency services and consultations.
The union highlighted that in an NHS where doctors are lacking and patients wait hours in emergency departments and months for an appointment, it is incomprehensible that doctors' time is taken away for administrative coding tasks. The SMN warned that a diagnosis cannot be chosen based on its monetary value and that no doctor can be pressured to assign, alter or make more specific a diagnosis without clinical basis to meet administrative or financial targets.
According to a legal opinion from the SMN, a dispatch is involved concerning the financing model of local health units, which receive funds according to the degree of morbidity and complexity of the population they serve. Non-specific diagnostic codes, such as R69, do not generate "complexity" and, consequently, do not generate as much funding for the hospital, so the motivation is essentially financial and managerial.
Given this situation, the SMN recommended that doctors maintain the rigor of their clinical records and that, when faced with the imposition of these tasks, they request that the determination be given in writing. The union recalled that any pressure to change diagnoses without clinical basis must be reported.
