APOMED-SP
(AssociaçãoPortuguesa dos Médicos Dentistas dos Serviços Públicos)
The Doctor. Manuel Pizarro, current Minister of Health, was only the 19th minister responsible for the Health portfolio who did not prove competent in resolving the adequate integration of dentists into the SNS. It was not due to a lack of time or opportunity, as the ministry renegotiated careers, created others and even, in just a few days, promoted dizzying changes to not one, but all of the statutes of the health professional orders.
In fact, since the creation of the SNS, dentistry has always been neglected in and by services, there has never been talent to create a career in dentistry in the SNS, which contributes to the pitiful state of oral health, especially among the poorest and most excluded. , who can only use the SNS.
This humiliating attitude towards public service dentists has been manifested throughout the legislatures, in repeated and fraudulent speeches regarding the legitimate aspirations of professionals as they repeatedly see themselves used as trained beings in the media circus of inaugurations or unveiling of tombstones, next to new offices.
Even the valuable reform that took place in 2016 with the pilot oral health projects, initially in 13 locations in the moribund ARS-Alentejo and LVT and which, in 2017, were extended to all the remaining ARS, quickly transformed into what are the conditions enslaving conditions typical of the 21st century, in which the worker is simply a number as a producer of wealth at the service of the employer, without any right to support for training, assistance in illness or parenting and at the same time easily disposable to the detriment of another who is compelled to accept the same, or more degrading, working conditions.
An example of these situations is the SNS taking advantage, from 2016, of the excellent training and quality of Portuguese dentists (so sought after and well paid in Europe at zero cost for this investment) by providing consultations in around 130 SNS health centers. oral health services that allowed access to hundreds of thousands of Portuguese people who, otherwise, would never have been able to access the most basic therapeutic oral health care, with all the repercussions on general health and quality of life that this represented over the decades.
At the same time, these dentists have been hired since then through service recruitment companies or through service provision contracts, which abuse this type of service among younger people, forcing them to end these “so fabulous” contracts in situations of illness or simple pregnancies or even making it difficult for them to update their training by discounting the days on which they participate in training, which will then allow for better provision of services.
This situation is the current reality for the overwhelming majority of dentists employed by public health services who work within working hours determined by the employer and in many situations with biometric attendance control, carried out on equipment and using materials made available by the employer and with replicated annual contracts, which despite the publicized and valid intentions of the current minister of labor to combat the so-called “false green receipts” has not yet discovered them within the scope of the SNS.
Having described the current situation of dentistry in the SNS, dentists feel, faced with this unexpected interruption of the legislature, that they have once again been enchanted by empty words about improving conditions alongside the immeasurable improvement and dedication that these young dentists brought to primary health care. Witnesses to this will be, more than governments or ministers, the Portuguese who every day encounter an excellent, highly differentiated professional, very often paid below the national minimum wage, due to holidays, participation in training, maternity or illness (as if it were possible to maintain health of this professional, forcing him to work from Monday to Friday, seven to eight hours a day, in an exercise of high performance and concentration, without the right to vacation and paid at 10, 9, 8 or even less euros per hour).
Therefore, it is important now in this upcoming period, and since, unlike other health professionals in the SNS, it is not envisaged that the current ministers will sit down at any negotiating table to palliatively try to resolve what cannot be resolved. have shown themselves competent in solving for dentists since September 1979 with the creation of the SNS, to be attentive to the electoral program proposals of the different parties competing in the elections of March 10, 2024, to understand which ones will have the courage to clearly expose their intention to create a career in dentistry in the NHS suited to medical and surgical skills in the field of oral health, and no longer a set of delaying words and acts.
