Portugal's first privately run state health centre opens today in Torres Vedras
The São Pedro da Cadeira family health unit is operated by KnokHealth under a five-year contract worth up to 2.4 million euros, and takes on 5,463 people who had no family doctor.
A family health unit in São Pedro da Cadeira opens on Monday as the first in the national health service to be run day to day by a private company. It takes on 5,463 residents of the Torres Vedras area who until now had no family doctor assigned to them.
The operator is KnokHealth Portugal, which won the contract from the Oeste local health unit and has since cleared the Court of Auditors. The contract runs for five years with a ceiling of 2.4 million euros, paid by the state. Patients pay what they would pay anywhere else in the service, which is to say almost nothing.
What a model C unit actually is
Model C was designed for places where more than four thousand people are on the books without a family doctor. In those areas the law allows the running of a unit to be contracted out to a private or a social-sector operator, always through the regional health unit, which keeps oversight and foots the bill.
What changes for the person walking in is who holds the keys, not the terms of care. The unit stays inside the national service, with the same fees and the same referral route to hospital specialists.
How many more are coming
The central health administration expects units of this kind to cover more than 250,000 patients, concentrated in regions where family doctor coverage is thinnest. The Algarve is the obvious case. Silves is expected to be next, with further projects earmarked for Lagos, Albufeira, Loulé and Portimão.
This is a real structural change to a system built for half a century around units the state ran itself, and it will be argued over. The question nobody can answer yet is whether these units can hold on to doctors in places the public ones could not, or whether they simply pull them across from elsewhere in the same network. The salaries advertised in the private tenders make the second worth watching closely.
For anyone living in São Pedro da Cadeira, though, the arithmetic is simpler than the politics. After years on the waiting list for a family doctor, there is a door that opens. Registration rules are set out on the national health service portal.
Image: Alexkom000 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
