Nine team leaders at the emergency department of Hospital Dona Estefânia — Lisbon’s main children’s hospital — have resigned. The ULS São José health authority confirmed on Friday that the letter was received at 9:53 p.m. and concerns “exclusively coordination and management duties.”
It is important to understand what happened — and what didn’t. The doctors have not left the hospital or abandoned their patients; they have stepped down from managing shifts. The emergency department is still operating. But when all nine people responsible for organizing the service step down at the same time, this is no longer just a complaint. It is a statement: they are no longer willing to be responsible for patient safety under conditions they consider unsafe.
The reason is a shortage of anesthesiologists. Without them, surgeries cannot go ahead, and in pediatric emergency care, operations often cannot wait. The hospital acknowledges that there were “difficulties filling anesthesiologist schedules” over the summer, attributing them to holidays and a nationwide shortage of specialists, and says it expects the “situation to gradually return to normal” as the holiday season ends. The doctors, apparently, do not believe this will happen: according to them, they repeatedly warned the Health Ministry, but received no response.
The problem is neither new nor limited to this hospital. At the end of August, Health Minister Ana Paula Martins publicly acknowledged a shortage of anesthesiologists at ULS São José: “There is a shortage across the country, but it is most strongly felt in the Lisbon and Tagus Valley region.” At Alfredo da Costa Maternity Hospital, there were only two anesthesiologists available at the time, according to RTP. The Portuguese Medical Association, the following day after the resignations, estimated the shortage of anesthesiologists in the public healthcare system at more than 600 and called for a national strategy, saying specialists are moving to private clinics, where they are paid more.
What does this mean for those living in Lisbon with children? Dona Estefânia is open, and in a critical situation, you should still go there. In fact, it is one of Lisbon’s leading pediatric hospitals. But the people who know better than anyone how the service works from the inside have just officially said that it was operating at its limit. And it looks like it is already starting to fall apart.
