“By the end of the year, a new system of agreements with family doctors will be launched to cater for those who still don’t have a family doctor,” said Ana Paula Martins, who is being heard by the parliamentary Health Committee this afternoon.
She told MPs that, in addition to the future model C units, which the social and private sectors will run, the new system of agreements will be “another way of extending the coverage of general and family medicine to those who need it most”.
“We still have a lot to do in primary health care so that it is effectively the gateway to the SNS, above all, to keep up with one of the biggest demographic shocks ever in the Portuguese population,” recognised the minister.
According to Ana Paula Martins, the coverage rate of users with a family doctor currently stands at 85.7%, “bucking the downward trend of the last four years”.
Between April 2024 and August 2025, 326,000 more patients had access to a family doctor, said the Health Minister, adding that due to demographic changes over the last seven years, the “resident foreign population has almost quadrupled”.
In this sense, the number of people registered and using the National Health Service at least once has increased from 405,000 in 2017 to more than 944,000 in 2024, according to Ana Paula Martins.
At the regimental hearing, the minister also pointed out that, after the last “winter went well” in terms of emergency services, the summer plan “also went smoothly”, claiming that, between 1 June and the end of August, there was an overall reduction of 41% in the number of days of emergency closures.
On 15 August, a barometer showed it was “the worst day of the year” due to health professionals’ holidays and because it is a public holiday, in 2024 there were “13 obstetric emergencies with problems”, while in August 2025 there were eight, said the minister.
Platform with Lusa
