Skip to main content

The long wiat

Image
By Helen Lee Gray
Waiting for a doctor in Portugal is a bit of a pain.  Whether it's a scan, a check up, an examination or something else, the Portuguese wait for hours.

I'm not saying that the health service is bad in Portugal as the health care you receive as a foreigner here is excellent.  It's the 'service' element that needs some attention.

Portugal's health service has a real problem, especially in our central location.  A very aging population combined with a serious amount of chronic diseases, cuts in funding, doctors moving overseas to earn more money, all go to add up to a system which from the outside view is in crisis. 

As an EU Citizen living in Portugal, you are entitled, automatically, to the same care a Portuguese person would get.  This includes a family doctor, emergency service and hospital care should the worst happen.  

However, a visit to the doctor means at least a 3 hour wait in my experience and a visit to a health care service as an outpatient in the hospital is a whole lesson in patience.    

Our health service runs a 'triage' clinic for people who don't have an appointment booked (an appointment is booked 3 weeks in advance).   You turn up a the health center before 9am to find a waiting room already full of old people.   You have to find the nurse, she asks what's wrong, takes your blood pressure and weighs you, then tells you to sit down.   You wait.

You wait.

Finally the receptionist, whose job it is to hate people and computers, comes and tells you to pay.  This means you're in, you pay your five Euro and you sit back down.   If the receptionist is feeling friendly or you ask with the nicest smile you have in your repertoire then you can find out 'roughly' what time you'll get seen.  
You go for a coffee

You come back

You wait

You wait

Then you get in.  

The doctors are always nice, they don't rush you.  They give you a bit of a Portuguese lesson and thank god, often they speak perfect English.   You never know how awful it is to try to describe pain in another language. 

It's much the same when you have an appointment at a clinic.  You turn up on time, but this time is just a 'rough guide' often 50 people have the same appointment time as you.   At a clinic you need to watch for the 'ticket system'  some waiting rooms operate on a 'take a ticket and wait your turn' system, some don't.  Failure to notice the hidden ticket machine can lead to a very long wait indeed.  Other clinics just make you queue. 

Queuing is something the Portuguese and the English have in common - we do good queuing! 

The moral of this story is to take a good book - You're going to be waiting a long time!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building our Barrel Vault Wood Fired Oven

By
This is a short description of my barrel vault build that I have done here in Central Portugal. The final internal size is a 1m squared floor with a arch height of 50cm. I hope you enjoy and get some ideas from it. I wish to thank ukwoodfiredovenforum  for their advice and support. • 1: First I dug out a hole in the flower bed, on top of the stone wall, where the oven was to be built • 2: Set up a form to pour in the concrete base • 3: Pour the concrete base, which was about 5-6 inches deep • 4: On top of the base I cast 4-5 inches of LECA (light weight expanded clay balls) mixed with cement to hold it's form • 5: Then I cast a 2-3 inch heat retaining base, to add to the thermal mass, using calcium aluminate cement with large grain sand, as a flat base for the hearth bricks to sit on • 6-8: I then dry laid the hearth bricks on a dry bed of fine sand and clay mixture, with th
1 comment
Read more

Read the signs

By Helen Lee Gray
In 2009/10 there was a brief outcry in the UK about the amount of unnecessary road signs on British roads.   The consumer group called Civic Choice submitted information that there were tens of thousands of excess road signs and that too many signs were confusing and distracting.    The AA results of a survey can be found here and the Campaign for Plain English also supported some of the findings. I think this problem has ‘gone global’, well at least ‘gone European’ OK maybe just ‘gone Portuguese’.   There is certainly a road sign disease spreading on the IC8, one of the major highways in Central Portugal.   This disease seems to have reached its peak in the area between the turn off for the IC3 and Castanheira de Pera.   The disease is spreading, the spores of signs scattering along the roadside and new signs growing all the time.   In this short distance, it takes just 10 mins to drive, it has been reported to me that there are a whopping 400 plus signs.   I tried
Post a Comment
Read more

oh what a lovely bougainvillea

By Helen Lee Gray
It was something I wanted to grow, a plant which would cover the wall, give shade, give colour and really stamp the fact we lived abroad.   Bougainvillea. We have the other Mediterranean type of plants growing; we have olives in abundance, we have the grapes thriving, we have the figs establishing, but alas no bougainvillea.    I looked up how to grow it and it says:   Bougainvillea thrives in full sun.   “At least 5 hours a day of direct sunlight is the minimal light required for good bloom. More hours of direct sun are better. Less than 5 hours and the plant may not bloom very well.”   5 hours of sun ‘check’, good light ‘check’, south facing ‘check’….but alas the Med we are not!   This little peak of Central Portugal has cold air in winter (snow even), a vigorous breeze at dusk and is prone to a late frost.   Our courtyard is just too exposed to the elements, there is no little ‘nook’ for a bougainvillea, there is no wall for it to climb up.   So, after a courageous start in
2 comments
Read more