Nurses' Union Warns SNS Vaccination System Failures Risk Double Jabs and Lost Records: How to Check Your Own Vaccine Record on SNS 24

A nurses' union has warned that repeated failures in VACINAS 2.0, the national system the SNS uses to record every vaccine it gives, could lead to people being vaccinated twice and to records going missing, in the middle of the autumn flu and COVID-19 campaign. The Associação Sindical Portuguesa dos Enfermeiros (ASPE) said on Friday that it had sent a formal complaint to the Serviços Partilhados do Ministério da Saúde (SPMS), the body that runs the SNS's information technology, and demanded urgent intervention, according to Lusa, as published by Observador.

What the nurses say is going wrong

ASPE described "successive failures": difficulty logging in, frequent interruptions and errors when registering the vaccines given. It said nurses are having to repeat procedures, try again and again to get in, and keep records to enter into the system later. Among the risks it listed are calling in people who have already been vaccinated, giving the same vaccine twice, difficulty confirming whether someone qualifies for a free jab, being unable to see some vaccination records, and information about administered vaccines piling up or being lost. The union said nurses face "the dilemma of vaccinating without a computer system". Lusa asked SPMS to respond and received no reply; no statement on the matter appears on the SPMS website. ASPE had already raised failures on the campaign's first day, according to the press coverage it lists on its own site.

SPMS launched VACINAS 2.0 on 6 April at the USF Bom Porto family health unit in Porto, saying it holds the vaccination calendar of more than 13 million people and gives "greater traceability, security, reliability and speed". Its chairman, Luís Goes Pinheiro, said the system cost more than 2 million euros under the Recovery and Resilience Plan and was "technologically much more robust" than the one it replaced. SPMS also said records would be "always accessible" on the SNS 24 portal and app.

Other front-line staff have raised the same problem. On Friday we reported that, in the annual survey of family health unit coordinators, satisfaction with the vaccination system fell from 61.9 percent to 43.7 percent.

The campaign carries on

The government says the campaign began on 30 September at SNS health units, participating community pharmacies and other designated places. Free flu vaccination now extends to children aged 2 to 4, and COVID-19 vaccination is aimed at people aged 70 and over plus those with risk conditions. Lusa reports the campaign runs until 31 March. More than half a million people had a flu jab in its first 12 days.

How to check your own record

Your vaccinations can be checked in the digital vaccination record (boletim de vacinas) on SNS 24. On the SNS 24 portal, sign in, open "A minha saúde" and choose "Boletim de vacinas"; in the SNS 24 app, sign in and use the same menu. The record shows each vaccine given, with the dose number, date and place, as well as vaccines due or overdue. Both the portal and the app offer "Descarregar boletim de vacinas", which saves the record as a PDF you can keep or print.

Given the backlog the union describes, a jab you have just had may not appear straight away. It is sensible to note the date, place and vaccine on the day, and to check SNS 24 a little later. Neither SPMS nor SNS 24 publishes a procedure for correcting a missing entry, so if a dose still does not show, raise it with the health centre or pharmacy that vaccinated you before accepting another dose of the same vaccine.