STTS Calls a 48-Hour National Health-Sector Strike for 4 and 5 May — Hospital Santa Maria Demo Frames the Pacote Laboral Fight, With the SEP Nurses' Strike Already Booked for 12 May

The Sindicato Nacional dos Trabalhadores dos Serviços e de Entidades com Fins Públicos (STTS) has filed a strike notice for a 48-hour national stoppage in the health sector running from 00:00 on Monday, 4 May to 24:00 on Tuesday, 5 May 2026. The notice — confirmed by union leadership in interviews with Renascença and ECO on 29 and 30 April — covers every worker in the Serviço Nacional de Saúde and the regional health authorities regardless of contract type, professional career, or union affiliation, an unusually broad scope designed to maximise pressure on the Ministry of Health and on a government already navigating the mid-July parliamentary reform cliff.

The arbitration tribunal that handled the inevitable minimum-services dispute has ordered staffing equivalent to a normal Sunday or public-holiday rota in every clinical service — the same skeleton crew that runs Portuguese hospitals on a quiet 1 May or Christmas Day, with no escalation permitted to ordinary weekday levels. Patients with appointments on 4 and 5 May should expect cancellations and rebookings; emergency rooms, intensive-care units, oncology and obstetric services will run, but elective procedures and most outpatient consultations are likely to be deferred.

The Demand Set — Pontos, Hours, Hiring, Salaries

The STTS notice contains four discrete demands, each tied to a specific grievance the union argues has accumulated through 2025 and into the first quarter of 2026:

• Restoration of evaluation points removed under recent changes to the SIADAP performance-evaluation system. Lost pontos translate into delayed career-grade promotions and lower lifetime salary, and the union frames the deduction as an arbitrary administrative cut imposed without negotiation.
• Urgent hiring to break the cycle of supplementary shifts that, the union says, routinely produce continuous workdays of 14 to 16 hours. The Ministry of Health's last public hiring round closed in February with appointments still working through the bureaucratic queue; the union argues that headcount additions are not keeping pace with retirement, attrition and the post-pandemic burnout that has driven thousands of clinicians out of the SNS into the private sector.
• Reimbursement of unpaid and unused hours banked by individual workers — the residual of the legal limit on weekly hours, which the SNS has historically settled with time-off-in-lieu rather than cash, and which has accumulated to non-trivial balances for many career staff.
• Fair salaries and dignified working conditions — the catch-all framing the union has used to tie the strike to the broader Council of Ministers agenda and to the pacote laboral package the Government tabled in March.

The union's public statement, issued in tandem with the strike notice, declared that "silence and indifference are no longer options" and that workers in prolonged exhaustion will not accept being treated with contempt — language pitched at the rank-and-file ahead of the Tuesday demonstration but read in Lisbon as a deliberate signal to the Concertação Social meeting scheduled for the following day.

The 5 May Demonstration — Santa Maria as Backdrop

The strike's visible centrepiece is a morning demonstration on Tuesday, 5 May at Hospital de Santa Maria in Lisbon — Portugal's largest public hospital and the symbolic heart of the SNS in the capital. Santa Maria has been the staging ground for several waves of healthcare protest in the past three years and offers organisers proximity to the Ministry of Health complex on Avenida João Crisóstomo, a short walk down the hill, plus dense television and radio coverage routes through the parallel Avenida Egas Moniz and Avenida Professor Egas Moniz traffic spine.

Union framing has explicitly tied the demonstration to opposition against the pacote laboral — the labour-code revision the Government has been pushing through Concertação Social since the 26 March cabinet meeting and which the CGTP has nominated as the trigger for its 3 June national general strike. STTS is not a CGTP affiliate, but the rhetorical alignment between the two unions across the May calendar is unmistakable, and it converges on the same window before Parliament's mid-July recess that the Recovery Plan monitoring commission flagged earlier in the week.

The 12 May Follow-On — SEP Nurses, International Nurses Day, Campo Pequeno March

The strike calendar does not stop on Tuesday. The Sindicato dos Enfermeiros Portugueses (SEP) — the dominant nurses' union — has separately filed strike notice for Tuesday, 12 May, deliberately scheduled on International Nurses Day. The SEP action, unlike the STTS stoppage, will cover not only the public SNS but also private and social-sector employers, broadening the affected footprint to private hospitals, Misericórdia-run units and the IPSS network that handles much of Portugal's continuing-care capacity.

SEP president José Carlos Martins, in remarks reported by Lusa, framed the 12 May action as an attempt to "resolve several problems" that overlap substantially with the STTS demand set: career-grade points, supplementary-hour cycles, and the sector-wide hiring shortfall. The accompanying demonstration will depart from Campo Pequeno mid-morning and march down Avenida da República to the Health Ministry. The route was negotiated with the PSP earlier this week and parallels the Carristur-strike traffic-disruption window already in motion on Saturdays 2 and 9 May.

Why the Calendar Matters

The compression of three healthcare-related strike actions inside an eleven-day window — STTS Mon-Tue 4-5 May, SEP Tue 12 May, and the broader CGTP general strike on Wed 3 June — is calculated to push the Government to the bargaining table before the pacote laboral debate moves to plenary. With Concertação Social meeting on Wednesday, 6 May (the day after the STTS stoppage) and the Council of Ministers running its weekly cycle through mid-May, the unions have engineered a sequence in which each strike feeds into the next consultative session.

For the SNS itself, the calendar comes on top of the structural strain already documented in the March budget execution print — a €1.06bn supplier-debt regularisation that consumed nearly the entire month's headline surplus — and the sector's recent productivity numbers, which point to continuing pressure on emergency rooms despite the SNS24 channel's record 15 million autodeclarações de doença in Q1.

What This Means for Expats

• If you have a hospital appointment on 4 or 5 May: assume cancellation. Phone your hospital's Centro de Marcações on the morning of the appointment to confirm; many units will reschedule automatically and SMS the new date, but the front desks are also accepting walk-ins to reschedule in person. Imaging, biopsies, surgery and outpatient consultations will be most affected; emergency-room access remains.
• If you are a resident on a chronic-medication renewal cycle: the STTS strike does not affect prescription pickup at pharmacies. SNS24 (808 24 24 24) and the SNS24 app continue to issue receitas eletrónicas. If your renewal falls on 4-5 May, request the prescription a day or two ahead through the app or your USF's online portal.
• If you need urgent care: emergency rooms run with minimum-services staffing. SNS24 is the entry point for non-life-threatening complaints; SU-AP and pediatric SU walk-in services will be open but slower. Private hospitals (CUF, Lusíadas, Luz, Hospital da Luz, Trofa Saúde) are unaffected by the STTS notice but will be drawn into the SEP action on 12 May.
• If you live in central Lisbon: traffic disruption around Avenida João Crisóstomo and Avenida Egas Moniz on Tuesday morning, 5 May. Metro stations Cidade Universitária and Saldanha will see crowd build-up; bus routes 731, 732, 738 and 755 are likely to be diverted. Allow extra time on the school run.
• If you employ Portuguese workers: health professionals on direct hospital contracts are entitled to strike protection under Portuguese labour law. Any deduction from monthly pay must be limited to the unworked hours; no ancillary penalty is permitted. Foreign-owned PT clinics employing nurses or auxiliaries should expect to receive the same notice and follow the same minimum-services protocol.

The Health Ministry has not, at the time of writing on the night of 1 May, issued a public response. The next pressure point is the 6 May Concertação Social meeting; if no movement comes out of that table, the SEP 12 May stoppage and the CGTP 3 June general strike escalate the timetable into the binding mid-July recess. STTS leadership has indicated that further action — including potentially open-ended sectoral stoppages — remains on the table if the demand set is not addressed before the parliamentary summer break.