Amadora Sintra Hospital

According to data available on the portal, at 10 am, in the general emergency room of the Professor Doctor Fernando Fonseca Hospital (Amadora-Sintra), in the Lisbon district, the 41 patients classified as urgent (with a yellow wristband assigned during triage) had a waiting time of nine hours and 49 minutes for their first observation by a doctor. In total, the hospital had 71 patients waiting for their first observation after triage at that time.

This was the unit with the longest waiting time in the emergency room at 10 am, a situation that has repeated for several reasons, including a lack of human resources and the unit's high healthcare pressure. In the municipalities served by this hospital, about 240,000 users lack a family doctor.

The executive director of the National Health Service (SNS), Álvaro Almeida, acknowledged earlier this month that the structural problems at Amadora-Sintra will not be resolved in the short term.

Portimão Hospital

At Portimão Hospital, which belongs to the Algarve Local Health Unit (ULS), the emergency room has also faced difficulties, and on 21 September, at 10 am, 27 urgent patients (yellow bracelet) had to wait five hours and forty-three minutes to be seen by a doctor. In total, 25 users were in the emergency room awaiting initial assessment.

In most other hospitals, emergency room wait times for urgent patients ranged from 15 minutes to two hours.

According to the triage system, very urgent situations (orange bracelet) should be seen within 10 minutes of triage, while urgent cases (yellow) should not wait more than 60 minutes. For less urgent cases (green bracelet), the recommended time is 120 minutes.