Additional surgeries at Santa Maria are subject to “12 control moments”

“We have strict control and monitoring of additional production. The first reason is patients. Additional production is very important to resolve the waiting list,” assured Carlos Martins, president of the Hospital de Santa Maria, to the deputies of the Health Committee, where he was heard this Tuesday at the request of the Liberal Initiative and Chega.

This hearing on the additional production of the Dermatology Service of the Santa Maria Local Health Unit (ULS) took place following the news about the use of the Integrated Management System for Surgery Registrations (SIGIC), which allowed a doctor to receive hundreds of thousands of euros for operating on patients on Saturdays.

Lusa news agency reports that the head of the ULS assured that additional production, within the scope of SIGIC, has “12 moments of automated control” and that the coding of surgeries to be performed is also audited. For Carlos Martins, the fact that not all processes that reach the local access management unit are validated for payment to health professionals “means that the system works”.

“There are processes that are not validated and no payment is made to the teams, which means that there is monitoring and control”, he stressed.

Asked about what went wrong in the case of the dermatologist who received 400 thousand euros in 10 Saturdays of additional work in 2024, Carlos Martins acknowledged that the failure could only have occurred between the “moment of the referral consultation and the computer registration”.

“That is where the issue may lie”, acknowledged the person in charge of the ULS, assuring that, if any irregularity is discovered, “there are two things that will happen: the return to the public treasury of whatever was eventually paid unduly and there will be consequences”.