Luís Duarte Costa resigned from the management of the Amadora-Sintra emergency department

The president of the Portuguese Society of Internal Medicine, Luís Duarte Costa, resigned at the end of February from his position as director of the General Emergency Service (SUG) of the Amadora-Sintra Local Health Unit, the doctor revealed this Tuesday, April 14, to Lusa.

The decision resulted from the impossibility of implementing the plan to reduce the number of patients admitted to the emergency department at Hospital Fernando Fonseca, one of the main causes of pressure on emergencies, he explained in an interview with Lusa.

“I resigned for that exact reason. I went there in May 2025 with the promise that we would be able to get out of there [do SUG] hospitalized patients”, he stated, recognizing that it was “a difficult promise to resolve”.

The big problem with that emergency, explained the doctor, is that it cannot drain the patients admitted there to the wards.

“The emergency teams, instead of treating the patients who register that day to be observed by the emergency room, are stuck with the 75 patients who are permanently hospitalized there,” he said.

The internist explained that a significant part of the problem is due to so-called social cases – users who remain hospitalized for social reasons, despite already being clinically discharged -, which represented 25% of hospitalizations.

And this happens because the hospital is not large enough for the “huge population it has to respond to”.

Among the solutions discussed were the creation of specific responses for social cases, eventually a social hospital, and the use of the 60 beds at the Sintra Hospital.

“This was not possible to do”, he stated, adding that this was one of the reasons for his departure, “after 10 months of pressure”.

Following his departure, ULS Amadora-Sintra appointed on March 9 an Emergency Service Management Committee, made up of eight doctors, who will remain in office until the appointment of a new director, an official source at the institution told Lusa.

Asked whether the pressure on emergency care is also due to the lack of professionals, Luís Duarte Costa stated: “If we thought about human resources just for emergency care, the number of doctors who were in the general emergency service at Amadora-Sintra were sufficient”.