With the word of honor of the worker to guarantee that he is sick and cannot perform his duties, it will be enough from today Monday to grant leave from work in Portugal for a maximum of three days, without the need to go to the doctor, who will indeed need to be visited if the incapacity situation lasts.
This unique and innovative procedure implemented by the Government of the socialist António Costa aims to reduce the pressure on the overburdened National Health Service, whose branches entered a situation of collapse in the exit phase of the pandemic.
The entry into force, scheduled for Saturday 1 April but postponed to Monday because it is the first working day, coincides with the beginning of Holy Week. In this way, it could be an immediate test to assess one of the risks of this measure, the picaresque. However, there is a limitation that, as the Portuguese Government has recalled, “as with the leaves granted by doctors, these first three days of leave are not remunerated, neither by the employer nor by the Social Security”.
In addition, a few weeks ago the Minister of Health, Manuel Pizarro, emphasized that with the new procedure a “national register” will be created, meaning that it will be updated immediately with the discharges that are processed every day. “It is very important because it will allow us to compare whether, with this measure, there are changes in the sense that abuses occur, which would be absolutely undesirable. Or if, on the contrary, we can be calm because it simplifies things”, affirmed Pizarro.
The change in the procedure for granting short-term leaves, approved in February as part of the Decent Work Agenda law, was pushed from the Executive by Pizarro himself, which shows that it is not of a labor measure, if not a health measure, aimed at dealing with the crisis that the overwhelmed public health service is suffering.
According to the ministry, the average of recent years of consultations for short-term leave in Portugal is more than 700,000, a workload with the release of which will try to alleviate the lack of doctors and the pressure inherited by everything that was postponed during the pandemic, as well as for its sequels (in the area of ​​mental health or for cases of persistent covid).
There were even dramatic situations, with deaths of pregnant women due to lack of resources in the emergency obstetrics area. Thus, the previous minister, Marta Temido, fell just a year after joining the Socialist Party; he received the card from the hands of Costa, as the rising value of the Government. The lack of doctors, a common problem in Spain, causes a multiplication of work for those who are active, through overtime at a fixed price, which in turn also contributes to the reduction of the workforce.
It is in this context, within the reorganization to optimize resources that Temido’s replacement, Manuel Pizarro, claims to promote, that the Government proposed at the beginning of this year to free health centers from care and tasks bureaucratic problems that involve short temporary work inabilities, such as for example due to a flu.
The Government wanted to channel them through the telephone line of the National Health Service, which provoked the protest of the College of Doctors. This is where the proposal for the word of honor procedure came out, which is now being applied.
