Seasonal health response for summer 2025 – the published order has no concrete implications for guaranteeing care
Through Order (Despacho) No. 4465/2025, the Secretary of State for Health established measures to ensure the response of the National Health Service (SNS) under the Ministry of Health’s seasonal health response plan for summer 2025. In the Algarve alone, the resident population increases exponentially and, naturally, health professionals, who also have families and need rest, also take holidays during the summer season.
Among the measures this order imposes on local health units, it was determined that duty rosters must be set in good time, ensuring the presence of medical, nursing and other health teams in proportion to care needs and, whenever necessary, reviewed, and that these rosters must be sent to the SNS Executive Board (DE-SNS, I. P.) at least two months in advance. In addition, extended opening hours at health centres and reinforced care for acute illness were imposed to avoid overloading hospital emergency departments, particularly those whose geographical location suggests a greater seasonal influx of patients due to holiday migration, mass events and international tourism.
This Summer Plan, however, does not solve the key issue: the extreme exhaustion of health teams and the national shortage of doctors in core specialties such as Paediatrics.
In our view, this order places an additional burden on the teams without any structural measures being taken to provide the SNS with the professionals needed to meet patients’ needs.
In the past, doctors could work in the Algarve during the summer under decent conditions that helped stabilise the teams during the summer season. That practice was discontinued some years ago, without any solutions being introduced that actually meet the needs of the population requiring health care during the summer.
For the Algarve, it will be yet another summer in which specialties such as Paediatrics, Orthopaedics and Surgery will remain without an emergency department response, as long as the measures to address the SNS’s needs lack structural, long-term planning.
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