IGAS Faults Porto's Santo António Hospital Over Its Surgery Chief's Unauthorised Private Work and Unrecorded Hours
The health inspectorate has closed its Castro Alves case: Santo António had no attendance checks and no control of doctors' private work. Four recommendations, all now in place, Público reports. What the law says on dual jobs.
Portugal's health inspectorate, the Inspeção-Geral das Atividades em Saúde (IGAS), has closed its inspection into Eurico Castro Alves, the surgery director at the Unidade Local de Saúde (ULS) de Santo António in Porto, with a finding that the hospital had no working system to check its doctors' hours or their private work. According to Público, which saw the IGAS note on 6 November, the inspectors issued four recommendations, and the ULS has already put all of them in place.
The case matters beyond one hospital. Many doctors in the national health service (SNS) also work in private practice, and the rules that keep the two apart only work if hospitals actually enforce them.
What the inspectors found
IGAS opened the case in November 2024 after complaints about how the surgical waiting list was managed and about Castro Alves combining his public post with private activity, Público reports. Castro Alves was also the first coordinator of the current government's Emergency and Transformation Plan for Health.
The final note, as quoted by Público, says the ULS "did not have" a system to control attendance, nor monitoring practices covering all its middle managers. It also had no mechanism to control acumulação de funções (holding a public post alongside outside work), and the inspectors established that the surgery director had held private roles that were not authorised.
On pay, Público reported in April that a preliminary audit found Castro Alves received more than 178,000 euros between 2021 and 2025 as coordinator of the team running produção adicional (extra surgery performed outside normal hours to cut waiting lists). With the board's consent, citing exceptional circumstances, he did not record his working time. IGAS says that gap could have been a disciplinary matter, but the low degree of fault, or the time elapsed (Público quotes "censurabilidade ou prescrição"), rules out taking it further. The hospital and the doctor had said at the time that the payments were legal.
IGAS also looked at surgery performed at the hospital on Hugo Soares, the PSD's parliamentary leader, and says it was not proven that Castro Alves intervened.
The four recommendations
- A chapter on attendance and dual jobs in the hospital's annual internal audit plan, covering middle managers too.
- A regulation on working hours and attendance, with monitoring procedures and sanctions for breaches.
- Working biometric clock-in systems in every unit of the ULS, and monitoring of them.
- Immediate measures to prevent a repeat of what happened with the surgery director.
Público's report carries no new comment from the ULS or the Ministry of Health on the conclusions, and on Saturday morning the IGAS note had not yet appeared on the IGAS press notes page.
What the law says about public doctors working privately
Public employees, including SNS doctors on public employment contracts, fall under the General Law on Work in Public Functions (Lei n.º 35/2014). Article 22 allows private work only if it is not legally incompatible, does not overlap even partly with public working hours, does not compromise impartiality, and does not harm the public interest. Article 23 requires prior authorisation, with a request stating where, when and for what pay the outside work is done. It also makes department heads responsible for detecting unauthorised dual jobs, on pain of losing their own posts.
What it means for you
If your SNS doctor also sees patients privately, that is lawful when authorised and kept outside public hours. The IGAS findings show those safeguards depend on hospitals checking them. Santo António was already under IGAS scrutiny this autumn over delays in heart surgery referrals to Gaia.
