INEM Heads Into Winter With 111 More Ambulances Than a Year Ago, as Its President Signals He Will Step Aside
INEM's president says 112 medical calls are now answered within 20 seconds and 581 fire brigade ambulances are on contract for winter, but the most critical cases still wait 12 minutes against an 8-minute target. He also signalled he will not lead the institute for long.
Portugal's emergency medical service, the INEM (Instituto Nacional de Emergência Médica), goes into the winter flu season with more ambulances, faster call answering and new dispatch technology, its president Luís Cabral said in a long interview with Observador published on 7 November. He also signalled that he does not expect to lead the institute once its new statute is in force: the next president, he said, "should not be a doctor".
For residents, the figures that matter are how quickly a 112 medical call is picked up and how quickly help arrives. Cabral says the first has improved sharply; the second is still short of target for the most serious cases.
What INEM says is in place for winter
- Ambulances: when the current board took office about a year ago there were 470 ambulances contracted from fire brigades; INEM enters this winter with 581, or 111 more, Cabral said. He named the Lisbon area, the south bank of the Tagus, Santarém district and the Algarve as the main beneficiaries. INEM now pays each of these emergency posts 10,800 euros a month, in force since 1 July 2026, according to the institute's one-year review.
- Call answering: the CODU (Centros de Orientação de Doentes Urgentes, the centres that triage medical 112 calls once the police operator transfers them) have held a 20-second answering target all year, Cabral said, against waits of up to 67 seconds in earlier years. INEM is taking about 5,000 calls a day.
- New vehicles: INEM has bought 275 new vehicles for 16.8 million euros. Cabral expects 88 delivered by the end of the year, enough to give all 44 VMER (rapid response cars carrying a doctor and a nurse) a new car, and about 20 new ambulances in December.
- Staff: INEM says it has hired more than 500 people since 2025 and plans a new competition for 200 more emergency technicians. Cabral said the target staffing is 1,350 technicians and that shortages remain worst in Lisbon and the Algarve.
Where it still falls short
For P1 calls, the most urgent of the five priority levels introduced in January, the target is to arrive within 8 minutes. Cabral said INEM has brought it down to about 12 minutes, still short of that target. He blamed lost minutes at the start of a call (the police transfer, triage, and phoning crews to dispatch them) and said a new system that sends jobs straight to tablets in each vehicle is being tested. Overall, he said, 90 percent of calls are answered within the set time.
He ruled out, for now, paying private companies to carry less urgent patients this winter, saying fire brigades on the south bank had offered more ambulances.
Is the president leaving?
Cabral said he agreed with the health minister to stay until the new organic law (Lei Orgânica, the statute that sets out how INEM is run) is finalised; its publication automatically ends the current board's term. Managing a budget of 330 million euros a year needs a manager, he said, adding that there are "more important roles" for him on the board than management. He did not say he would resign.
What it means for you
Nothing changes in how you call for help: dial 112 for a medical emergency. Expect a fire brigade or Red Cross ambulance more often than an INEM-crewed one, since partners provide most of the cover. The budget behind all this was covered in our piece on INEM's 2027 budget, and the brigade rollout in our 1 October report.
