Porto's Santo Antonio Scheduled 193 Extra Operating Programmes for September, and Orthopaedics and Neurosurgery Received None of Them

Hospitals in Portugal cut surgical waiting lists largely through what the health service calls produção adicional, or additional production: operating sessions run outside the normal timetable, staffed by teams paid separately for the extra output. At the Unidade Local de Saúde de Santo António (Santo António Local Health Unit) in Porto, the doctors' union says that mechanism has been switched off in two specialties, and reduced to roughly a third across the whole hospital.

The Sindicato dos Médicos do Norte (Northern Doctors' Union) put the claim in a statement on Monday, citing an internal circular. It says that for September the unit has scheduled only 193 additional programmes across all of its activity, which it puts at about a third of the usual volume, and that the fall follows the suspension of all additional production in orthopaedics and neurosurgery.

The union's case

"It is less capacity to operate on and treat the patients in these specialties who are already on a waiting list," the statement says. "For patients, this blockage can mean more suffering, dependency and uncertainty. For families, added care and lost income."

The union directs its demands at two places. The first is the unit's own board, which it says has to answer for the suspension and for what it did to keep the operations happening inside the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (National Health Service). "Communicating an impasse is not resolving it," the statement says. The second is the Health Minister, who the union argues has to set clear rules and the conditions for teams to operate, and whose position it describes as announcing a campaign against waiting lists while surgical activity is allowed to stall.

It asks three specific questions: how many patients were affected, how many operations went undone, and when the programmes resume. The hospital had not answered publicly by Monday afternoon.

What the official numbers show

Portugal's health service publishes the underlying waiting-list data through the Portal da Transparência (Transparency Portal). In June 2026, the most recent month available, 7,835 patients were registered on the surgical waiting list at ULS de Santo António. Of those, 6,457 were inside the tempo máximo de resposta garantido, the maximum guaranteed response time set for their priority level, which works out at 82.4 percent. The remaining 1,378 were waiting longer than the rules allow.

That share has been remarkably stable. It has sat between 79.8 and 83.2 percent every month since the start of 2024, and the raw number on the list has moved between roughly 7,400 and 9,400 over the same period. The portal does not break the figure down by specialty, so the effect of the two suspensions will not be visible in it for months.

A familiar squeeze

The dispute lands in a year when hospitals were told to hold activity flat rather than expand it. In April, health administrations were instructed not to increase surgeries or consultations in 2026, with the combined national waiting list already past 1.3 million people.

Santo António is one of the largest hospitals in the north, a university unit that took its current form in the 2024 reorganisation that folded hospitals and health centres into local health units. It is not the only northern unit the same union has taken issue with in recent weeks: it has also raised emergency staffing at Entre Douro e Vouga and doctors' working conditions at Alto Ave.

For patients, the practical question is narrower than the institutional argument. An operation scheduled into an additional session is an operation that was not going to fit into the ordinary week. If those sessions do not run, the patient does not move up the list; the list simply gets longer behind them.