‘University students come here to learn, and they must leave more educated than when they arrived’, said Adalberto Campos Fernandes, Minister of Health of the XXI Constitutional Government from 2015 to 2018, during a lesson within the Engineering, Decision and Public Policies curricular unit, held at Técnico – Alameda campus.
This curricular unit is part of the ‘Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences’, and aims to develop students’ critical thinking about how engineering and decision-support systems—including risk assessment, data analysis, decision analysis, statistical analysis, optimisation, participatory modelling, communication, and scenario planning—can improve political analysis and decision-making in a real context.
Adalberto Campos Fernandes gave the lecture ‘Challenges for universality, equity and sustainability in Health’, in which he addressed the role of health services—and, in particular, the National Health Service (SNS)—in the lives of the Portuguese and the importance and impact of proper management of these services.
‘In 50 years of democracy, the country you’re living in today has nothing to do with what it was before’, he shared. ‘In 1974’, he continued, ’the infant mortality was 32 live births per thousand; today we have less than 3 per thousand, and life expectancy at birth has increased by more than 10 years.’
During the lecture, he also discussed Portugal’s performance in the rankings that measure health care service performance: ‘Portugal ranks between 12th and 20th place’ worldwide. ‘Portugal performs better in health and education than in economics. Even so, the SNS is universal, general and free at the point of use’, he added.
According to Adalberto Campos Fernandes, ‘health is not debatable’ and ‘everyone should be able to access the health care they need regardless of who they are’. He also mentioned that ‘countries like ours suffer from this generosity. There is organised health tourism that allows people to take advantage of the SNS at no cost, unlike in other countries’, he said.
He emphasised that the SNS – in the current mixed system – works as a ‘smoother of social inequalities’. The public component is therefore ‘structuring’, and the private component ‘complementary’. The speaker asked the audience: ‘As people, citizens, with the relationship you have with the health care system, do you feel like users, clients or patients?’ A large majority of those present answered users. Adalberto Campos Fernandes agrees: ‘Most of us are not sick, a pregnant woman is not sick, if we go to see if everything is ok with our health, we are not sick. Nor do we want everyone who goes to the services to be sick in preventive medicine.’
Trying to stimulate audience participation, Adalberto Campos Fernandes asked more questions throughout the lecture (‘How many countries are there in the world?’; ‘Where does Portugal rank in terms of GDP worldwide?’; ‘What does a free health care system at the point of use look like?’). Then, he praised the accuracy of the students’ answers – “you can really tell that we’re at Técnico”.
On a final note, Adalberto Campos Fernandes left a message to the audience: ‘Be curious and appreciate this SNS. I wish you good health until you’re 90’.
