Health plans night care to eliminate SUS queues – 03/26/2023 – Health

The federal government promises to take health professionals to the North of the country and perform procedures at night and on weekends to try to eliminate the queue of elective surgeries of the SUS (Unified Health System), one of the priorities of the first 100 days of the government of the President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (PT).

The folder announced in January that the National Program for Reducing Queues will transfer R$ 600 million to states and municipalities to carry out these procedures. The first installment of the resource, of R$ 200 million, will be delivered with the approval of the diagnosis sent by the states.

In an interview with Sheetthe secretary of Specialized Health Care of the Ministry of Health, Helvécio Miranda Magalhães Júnior, lacks information, but estimates that there are 2 to 3 million surgeries dammed in the country.

The states and municipalities were responsible for sending information on the dammed procedures and priorities. In this way, the Ministry of Health will have an accurate diagnosis of the situation in Brazil.

“We are taking the opportunity to understand the mechanism of each state to know its queue. There are queues that the states organize, that the municipalities organize, there are queues inside the hospital. Patients move from one queue to another and not all of them [as filas] has the information with CPF”, he said.

The folder requires that in the document the federation units inform the size of the queue, the expectation with the reduction plan, which procedures are placed as a priority, in which municipalities and providers.

The folder has already received 11 plans from the following states: Amapá, Amazonas, Tocantins, Bahia, Acre, Rondônia, Maranhão, Piauí, Federal District, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo. The plans of the last seven units of the federation were approved.

In Brazil, according to the secretary, the SUS queue is large and distorted. That’s because, depending on the procedure, there are people who wait more than a year. He mentioned that in Roraima, for example, there are no elective surgeries.

“A person with a gallbladder problem needs to wait for complications, there are situations that are not acceptable. Is it worth putting money in Roraima? and transform it to also operate on an elective basis. We want Ebserh [Empresa Brasileira de Serviços Hospitalares] take over this hospital,” he said.

The secretary said that there will be different strategies in order to meet the specificities of each state. There will be a partnership with public, philanthropic and even private hospitals, including the federal hospitals of Ebserh, which currently has 41 units.

The secretary said that one of the strategies should be the migration of complete teams of doctors from the South and Southeast to the North, the region with the greatest deficit of health professionals in the country.

“We first need to have a picture of the need, let’s put a person in each state to understand the dynamics. The managers prepare the patients, schedule the surgery and we take teams to the region. The USP staff [Universidade de São Paulo]from Unifesp [Universidade Federal de São Paulo]and Unicamp [Universidade Estadual de Campinas] are willing to do that,” he said.

In his view, state managers can partner with private hospitals to perform surgeries at night and on weekends. For the North region, the intention is to carry out a joint effort on the Amazon River in partnership with the Air Force.

The secretary said that in Brazil there are few hospitals that perform cardiac surgeries on newborns, for example. The intention is also to put an end to this type of queue, taking children to the surgery where the procedure is performed, which is more complex.

This is the first strategy for the National Program to Reduce Queues. In the second half, according to the Ministry of Health, the ministry should announce transfers to reduce diagnostic tests.

Experts claim that the federal program has to be well structured to avoid using resources without resolving the problem.

Cesar Eduardo Fernandes, president of the AMB (Brazilian Medical Association) said that the Covid-19 dammed up the queues because all medical apparatus was sent to care for the disease. As a result, infectious, transmissible, chronic and oncological diseases were hampered in tracking.

“A policy for reducing queues is important and needs to be well designed due to the complexity of the country. It is not enough to take a doctor to certain regions to perform surgeries if you do not have the necessary structure”, he said.

Diego Xavier, a researcher at Fiocruz’s Institute of Communication and Scientific and Technological Information in Health, shares the same view. He says that for more complex surgeries, the diagnosis needs to be improved.

“We know that there is not a large budget to carry out the procedures, but a good alternative is also to make this partnership with the private sector”, he said.