INEM changes its rulebook on August 1, and Portugal's emergency service gets a four-seat board
INEM's new organic law takes effect on August 1: a special-regime public institute, a board doubled to four, and the door opened to deals with private ambulance operators.
From Saturday, the institute that answers 112 and sends the ambulances out stops running on rules written in 2012. INEM’s new organic law was published in mid-July and takes effect on August 1. Most of what it changes sits inside the machine rather than on the road — but it decides who calls the shots when somebody dials for help.
What changes at INEM on August 1?
Three things, mainly. INEM becomes a special-regime public institute, with its own statute inside the state administration. The board, which had two members, grows to four, and two of those seats now have to be filled by a doctor and a nurse — the point being that the people deciding should have worn scrubs, not just read spreadsheets. And the way INEM talks to the local health units gets redesigned, so pre-hospital emergency care and hospitals stop communicating by smoke signal.
Will INEM start working with private operators?
It can. The decree opens the door to agreements with private patient-transport operators, and that is the most argued-over piece of the reform. Supporters call it a pressure valve for demand spikes. Critics call it the first step in handing out a service that ought to be public end to end.
What happened to the regional delegations?
They are gone from the text. The 2012 setup had three — North, Centre and South — and the new decree-law leaves them out. INEM’s president, Luis Mendes Cabral, has said the four CODU dispatch centres stay put and that support services in Porto, Coimbra and the Algarve will get more staff, with no cut to resources or response capacity.
The workers’ commission tells it differently, warning of extra load falling on firefighters and the Red Cross, with its own arithmetic on ambulances pulled from the fleet. This is not an argument a press release settles. It gets settled by response times across the summer — the same summer Portugal’s emergency rooms went into with rosters unfinished. The law and the reform’s paper trail are on the INEM website.
Image: Jsobral / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
