The SNS Retires Its Two-Decade-Old Surgery Waiting-List System for a New Digital Platform
From 1 August, the National Health Service has replaced the 20-year-old SIGIC with SINACC, a new platform for managing access to surgery and, later, consultations and diagnostics — alongside new rules for contracting private and social-sector providers to cut waiting times.
One of the most quietly consequential changes to Portugal's public health service in years took effect on 1 August, and most patients will never see it happen. The Serviço Nacional de Saúde (National Health Service, or SNS) has retired SIGIC, the system that has managed surgical waiting lists for two decades, and replaced it with a new digital platform: the Sistema Nacional de Gestão do Acesso a Consultas e Cirurgia (National System for Managing Access to Consultations and Surgery, or SINACC).
The switch begins with surgery — the area SIGIC was built to handle — and is designed to expand from there to cover outpatient consultations and diagnostic tests, eventually pulling the different queues that patients face into a single framework. The ambition is not merely to swap one piece of software for another but to give managers a clearer, more current picture of who is waiting, for what, and for how long, so that capacity can be steered toward the longest backlogs.
The new platform does not arrive alone. Two accompanying ordinances, published in the Diário da República (the official gazette) and effective the same day, reshape the machinery around it. One sets fresh rules for the conventions — the contracts through which the Administração Central do Sistema de Saúde (Central Administration of the Health System, or ACSS) buys scheduled consultations and operations from private and social-sector providers when the public network cannot keep pace. The idea is to make it easier and quicker to route waiting patients to a clinic or hospital outside the SNS, and so shorten the lines, under clearer terms.
A second ordinance tightens the front end of the process, requiring electronic registration of patients for first consultations and surgeries. In practice, that means the moment a patient is referred or listed should be captured digitally from the outset, rather than logged inconsistently across hospitals. Cleaner data at the point of entry is what makes the rest of the system work: without an accurate, real-time record of demand, neither the SNS nor its private and social partners can be directed to where the need is greatest.
Waiting times have been among the most sensitive measures of the health service's health, and successive governments have promised to bring them down. The bet behind SINACC is that better information and smoother contracting will do more than exhortation — that a system able to see its own queues clearly, and to overflow reliably into contracted capacity when hospitals are full, can chip away at delays that have proved stubbornly resistant to funding alone.
For patients, the transition is meant to be invisible in the short term. Existing entries carry over, referrals continue, and the reforms are administrative rather than clinical. The real test will come over the following months, as the platform beds in, the consultation and diagnostic modules are switched on, and the new convention rules are used in earnest. If it works as intended, the payoff will show up not in a launch announcement but in a gradually shortening wait for an operation or an appointment — the kind of change that, for anyone stuck in a queue, matters more than the technology behind it.
