The worker’s word of honor to guarantee that he is sick and cannot perform his duties will be enough from today to grant sick leave in Portugal for a maximum of three days, without the need to go to the doctor, who will need to be visited if the disability situation is prolonged.
This unique and innovative procedure implemented by the government of the socialist António Costa is intended to reduce pressure on the overloaded National Health Service, whose branches entered a situation of collapse in the exit phase of the pandemic. The mechanism can only be used twice a year and is expected to be channeled through the telephone service and, above all, the online platform of the Portuguese health system.
The entry into force, scheduled for Saturday, April 1, but postponed to this Monday as it is the first working day, coincides with the beginning of Holy Week. In this way, it could already be an immediate test to evaluate one of the risks of this measure, the picaresque. However, there is the limitation that, as the Portuguese Government has recalled, “similar to what happens with sick leave granted by doctors, these first three days of sick leave are not paid, neither by the employer nor by Social Security â€.
In addition, the Minister of Health, Manuel Pizarro, highlighted a few weeks ago that with the new procedure a “national registry” will be created, it is understood that it will be immediately updated with the casualties that are processed daily. “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 rest easy because it simplifies things,” Pizarro said.
The change in the procedure for granting short-term sick leave, approved in February within the framework of the Decent Work Agenda law, was promoted by Pizarro himself from the Executive, which shows that it is not a labor measure , but health, aimed at dealing with the crisis suffered by the overwhelmed public health service.
According to the ministry, the average of consultations for short-term sick leave in Portugal in recent years is more than 700,000, a workload whose release will try to alleviate the lack of doctors and the pressure inherited from everything that was postponed for the pandemic, as well as its aftermath (in the area of ​​mental health or persistent covid cases).
There were even dramatic situations, with deaths of pregnant women due to lack of resources in the obstetric emergency area. Thus, the previous minister, Marta Temido, fell just a year after joining the Socialist Party, receiving the card from 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 piece-rate overtime, which in turn also contributes to reducing the workforce.
It is in this context, within the reorganization to optimize resources that Temido’s replacement, Manuel Pizarro, claims to promote, in which the Government proposed at the beginning of this year to free health centers from the attention and bureaucratic tasks that they entail short temporary work incapacities, such as the flu.
The Government wanted to channel them through the telephone line of the National Health Service, which provoked a protest from the College of Physicians, from there came the proposal for the word of honor procedure, which is now applied.
