The Order of Dentists (OMD) lamented the government's inaction, before the pilot projects to include dentists in health centers. In a statement, the order informs that the projects mark five years without the defined goals are being fulfilled.
The main objective of having at least one dentist in all clusters of health centers is far from reaching and the whole process is stopped from the beginning of the pandemic, it can read in the news published on the OMD website.
The government has released this project for five years to begin to fill a serious failure in the National Health Service that 40 years ago left out of dental medicine. The pilot project was created to give the most disadvantaged population, with a range of restricted treatments.
The president of OMD, Miguel Pavão, considers that the government pilot project fails in virtually the entire line and defrauds the expectations of patients and professionals. In five years, nothing has changed. Continues to be a pilot project, only for those who have great economic shortage and although to welcome the number of treatments and interventions already carried out, they have surely changed the lives of patients, the truth is that limitations continue to be huge.
With regard to the situation of dentists who are part of the pilot project, Bastonario denounces the precarious conditions in which they work. Most are contracted by companies, through agreements to provide 12-month services, without holiday subsidy or Christmas, without the right to support in unemployment and without any chance of being integrated into the staff.
Miguel Peacão further recalls that there is a specific career for dental medicine in the National Health Service, approved by the Ministry of Health, but it has been waiting for the Ministry of Finance for years. An unacceptable situation that leaves doctors dentists without possibility of making career in the National Health Service as other health professionals.
For the OMD Bash is urgent to look at this pilot project and make it definitive, in five years there was time to know how to do it. It is necessary to ensure dentists in all health centers, implementing the career of dental medicine in the National Health Service, hiring dentists without a term contract, to end the turnover of professionals, extend the concept of economic shortness to cover more population and increase the number of treatments available, possibly using a convention with the private sector.
