STTS Calls Health Sector Out for 24-Hour Stoppages on Monday and Tuesday — Demonstration at Hospital Santa Maria 10:00 on 5 May Opens the Pacote Laboral Streetfight

The Sindicato Nacional dos Trabalhadores dos Serviços e de Entidades com Fins Públicos (STTS) has called every worker in Portugal's health sector — public, private and social, regardless of career, contract or union — out for two consecutive 24-hour stoppages from 00:00 to 24:00 on Monday 4 May and Tuesday 5 May 2026, with a demonstration outside Hospital de Santa Maria in Lisbon at 10:00 on the second day. The action lands inside the year-long strike notice STTS filed at the very end of 2025 and immediately before the next round of Concertação Social on Wednesday 7 May, turning the hospital floor into the first physical battlefield of the Pacote Laboral fight.

The strike notice and what it covers

The walkout is filed under the year-long pré-aviso STTS deposited at the end of December 2025 — a continuous notice covering 1 January through 31 December 2026, structured to let the union call discrete days of action without re-filing each time. Coverage is sector-wide and category-blind: the notice names "Médicos, Enfermeiros, Técnicos Superiores de Diagnóstico e Terapêutica, Técnicos Auxiliares de Saúde, Assistentes Operacionais" and "todos os outros trabalhadores do setor da saúde, qualquer que seja o seu vínculo, carreira ou filiação sindical." Public-hospital ULSes, IPSS-run social health units and private hospital groups all sit inside the perimeter, which means Multicare, Médis and Generali Saúde subscribers are not insulated from the disruption — private-hospital nursing and operational staff who join the walkout will take Monday and Tuesday off the same way SNS staff will.

Six demands — and why SIADAP sits at the centre

The STTS list runs six items deep. First on the page is the restoration of pontos SIADAP — the public-administration performance points that were stripped from health-sector careers in earlier evaluation rounds and that block step-progression inside each carreira. Second is the regularisation of performance assessments themselves, which have been chronically delayed across ULSes. Third is recognition of Técnicos Auxiliares de Saúde as a profissão de desgaste rápido — the fast-burnout category that triggers earlier retirement entitlements. Fourth is urgent hiring at scale to end what the union calls the "uso e abuso de turnos suplementares e jornadas de 14 e 16 horas de serviço contínuo." Fifth is the payment and restoration of unpaid and untaken hours that have accumulated across years of staffing gaps. Sixth — and the immediate political accelerant — is opposition to the Government's pacote laboral, which STTS coordinator António Moreira characterises as a structural attack on shift-and-evaluation rights.

"O STTS não aceita mais que quem cuida dos outros seja tratado com desprezo," Moreira said when announcing the action. "Exigimos o que é nosso por direito, valorização, salários justos e condições de trabalho dignas." The union frames the SNS as facing what it calls a colapso silencioso — a silent collapse — built on cumulative gaps the December 2025 pré-aviso was designed to put on the calendar with weekly cadence.

Minimum services and what gets through

Minimum services for the two days were set by the arbitral court at the equivalent of Sunday or holiday staffing, with the explicit ceiling that staffing levels per service unit cannot exceed normal weekday numbers. In practice that means urgent and emergency care, ICU, oncology day-hospital, dialysis and haemato-oncology day units must keep running; scheduled surgery, scheduled imaging, scheduled outpatient consultations and non-urgent diagnostics are exposed. Public-hospital walk-outs from previous STTS days in 2026 have run with adhesion concentrated in scheduled-care segments, where management can defer rather than redirect — the urgent and continuous-care services have generally held up.

The 5 May Santa Maria march

The single in-person event on the calendar is the demonstration at Hospital de Santa Maria, Lisbon, at 10:00 on Tuesday 5 May. STTS has called workers from across the Lisbon-Vale do Tejo cluster — ULS Santa Maria, ULS São José, ULS Lisboa Ocidental, ULS Loures-Odivelas, ULS Amadora-Sintra, ULS Estuário do Tejo and the private-hospital cluster around Lisbon — to converge on the Avenida Professor Egas Moniz frontage of Santa Maria for a stand-and-speak before walking the perimeter. The choice of Santa Maria deliberately overlays last week's coverage of the Hospital Dona Estefânia anaesthesiology shortage and the chronic agency-staff problem at the largest mainland tertiary-care hospital.

The 12 May follow-up — SEP nurses

The STTS action is the front end of a two-week sequence. The Sindicato dos Enfermeiros Portugueses (SEP), under president José Carlos Martins, has separately scheduled a national nurses' strike for Tuesday 12 May — International Nurses Day — with a Lisbon demonstration leaving Campo Pequeno and marching to the Ministry of Health. SEP's previous national stoppage on 20 March 2026 ran at 71 percent adhesion across SNS hospitals, the highest single-day nurses' adhesion of the post-pandemic period; the 12 May action is structured to repeat or surpass that benchmark. Together, the STTS 4-5 May days, the SEP 12 May day and the CGTP 3 June general strike stack three separate sectoral and confederal stoppages into a five-week window framing the Concertação Social closing date.

Concertação Social cross-pressure

The political timing is not accidental. Wednesday 7 May closes the social concertation track on the Government's pacote laboral, with six points still in dispute and UGT refusing to yield on the headline shift-rules and supplementary-hour package. By calling Monday and Tuesday strikes immediately before the Wednesday close, STTS forces the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Labour to negotiate against the visible street-level cost of the package as it is being voted up or down inside CES. The hospital-floor disruption running through the window when ministers walk into the meeting is exactly the lever the union notice was designed to give. On the cross-border public-health surveillance rail, our 18 May DGS hantavirus read — Canadian Andes-variant patient on a 10 May Tenerife-Canada repatriation flight with a 12-strong Portuguese cabin crew, FFP2 masks in cabin, post-landing decontamination, symptoms onset four days after the flight and a 45-day occupational-health surveillance window through 23 June sets the latest reference. On the public-health surveillance and vaccination rail, our 18 May ULSBA Beja read — three epidemiologically-linked measles cases since early April across the 30-to-55 age band, nearly 500 risk contacts mapped, 120+ post-exposure VASPR doses delivered through the USF / UCSP / Hospital José Joaquim Fernandes chain and Bruno Pinto Rebelo's surto classification sets the latest reference. On the SNS access and primary-care setup side, our 2026 practical guide to getting the Número de Utente do SNS — the centro de saúde first-visit walk-in for foreign residents, the gov.pt online pedido authenticated by Chave Móvel Digital, the RNU registration, the SNS24 app activation, the EU/EEA S1 and EHIC routes, the CPLP and third-country residence-permit equivalence, the médico de família queue, and the 2026 taxas moderadoras frame that now hits only hospital emergency-department visits without primary-care referral sets the latest reference. On the private-healthcare dividend file, our 27 May read on CUF's 26 May CMVM filing — €32 million dividend distribution from the €37.68 million separate-account net result, €51.2 million 2025 consolidated net profit up 18.1%, €12.4 million employee bonus pool, José de Mello Capital (65.85%), Farminveste (30%) and Fundação Amélia da Silva de Mello (4.15%) shareholders sets the latest reference. On the SNS, Serviço Nacional de Saúde, Centro de Saúde registration, Número de Utente, SNS24 triage line and taxas-moderadoras side of the file, our 2026 practical guide to registering with the SNS in Portugal — the Número de Utente, the USF / UCSP family-doctor model, the SNS24 portal flow, the taxas-moderadoras schedule and the documents your Centro de Saúde will ask foreign residents for sets the latest reference. On the Algarve, Faro, private-healthcare, Lusíadas Saúde, Vivalto Santé, hospital-investment and SNS-capacity side of the file, our 22 June read on Lusíadas Saúde committing €60 million to a new five-floor hospital in Faro — 28 beds, five operating theatres, an ICU and 500 jobs landing in the Algarve by the end of 2027 sets the latest reference. On the maternity, prenatal-care, birth-registration and family-benefit side of the file, our 2026 guide to having a baby in Portugal — SNS prenatal care, public vs private maternity, registering the birth and parental benefits sets the latest reference.

What patients and residents should expect

• SNS appointments and procedures scheduled for Monday 4 May and Tuesday 5 May should be considered exposed to cancellation or rescheduling. ULSes will issue per-hospital communications via the SNS 24 contact channel and the per-ULS SMS push line; default behaviour is that scheduled patients are notified within the 24 hours before the day. Walking in for non-urgent care during the strike days is not advised.
• Urgent and emergency care at SNS hospitals continues. Minimum-service staffing keeps the urgência geral, urgência pediátrica, the ICU, dialysis, oncology day-hospital and continuous-care services covered. SNS 24 (808 24 24 24) remains the triage gateway.
• Private-hospital and PT health-insurance subscribers are not automatically insulated. Private-sector nursing and operational staff are inside the STTS perimeter and may join. Confirm any scheduled procedure or imaging at private groups (Lusíadas, CUF, HPA, Luz Saúde) directly with the booking line on the morning of the appointment.
• The 5 May 10:00 demonstration at Avenida Professor Egas Moniz means traffic and parking around the Cidade Universitária / Santa Maria perimeter will be constrained. The metro Linha Amarela station Cidade Universitária is the cleanest access point. Expect Egas Moniz to be partially closed at the demonstration window.
• Foreign-resident SNS users with no SNS 24 mobile-on-file should set the number on the SNS 24 portal before Monday — the per-hospital SMS push is the operational notification channel during disruption days. The two-month doctor-shortage backdrop — 1.59 million SNS users without a family doctor — already pushes more residents into hospital pathways; the strike days narrow that funnel.