Expat Community > Portugal

Aleo
Joined 2019
Posts: 38

Cautionary tale about the Portuguese healthcare

1 year ago

This story will be useful for people who are considering moving to Portugal and for those who already moved.

I relocated to the Algarve from the US about three years ago. When I was researching Portugal (and the Algarve in particular) I naturally paid much attention to healthcare. From the research and, later, from talking to other expats, I got an impression that Portuguese public healthcare is okay, but very slow, however, having a private insurance solves all problems - modern hospitals, good doctors, fast service...

My story started in July 2022 when I had COVID and right after that I got an enlarged armpit lymph node. From what I had read, it is a quite common side effect of various infections so I waited about two weeks before I started to get worried and went to see a doctor in a large local private hospital, which is part of one of the biggest (or, maybe, the biggest) private hospital chains in Algarve.

And then the problems started... Here is how the process looks like in a private hospital here. You schedule an appointment with a doctor and after several days, you see the doctor who writes you a prescription for a test or an exam and tells you to come back when you receive the result. You need to schedule this test (and the process of scheduling itself sometimes takes a week), then you wait for a test (another several days), then you wait for test results (could be another week or more), then you schedule the doctor appointment to discuss the results and the next steps, then you wait for the appointment, then you visit the doctor, and the cycle repeats.

It is common here for hospitals to not answer the phone, or if the hospital has a dedicated call center, they do answer the phone after some time on hold, but they can only answer very basic questions; for everything else they connect you to the corresponding department in the hospital, where the phone is not answered. There are no direct incoming phone lines in these departments, so going through the call center is unfortunately the only way. You can get their email addresses, but I have never received a response to my numerous emails.

It took me more than two months to get to the point where I had results of the biopsy of my lymph node and by that time it was a metastasized melanoma, which is quite a deadly cancer.

The doctor was very sympathetic and he told that he will bring my case to the oncology meeting in the hospital in two days and will call me back with the further instructions right after the meeting. Guess what - he never contacted me! I received a call from the reception after more than a week, suggesting to schedule an appointment with an oncologist.

By that time, I found a doctor in a large private hospital in Lisbon and within five days from the doctor's visit I had three CAT scans, some nuclear medicine exam, and had a major surgery removing the tumors they've found so far.

The point of this story is two-fold:

* If you are considering moving from the US (I don't have experience with the healthcare in other countries) to Portugal, think hard about the healthcare. Don't get carried away by the stories of expats who didn't have any serious medical issues. On the surface it looks marvelous: the private hospitals are new and shiny and the healthcare here is extremely affordable - I pay for private insurance (several hundred per year) and they cover 90% of most services. CAT scan with interpretation costs 10 euros and a major 5-hour surgery with two nights in the hospital cost me less than 600 euros. But be aware that if you have a serious and urgent problem, your mileage would vary and you may be risking your life! If it is serious but not urgent, you can probably go through all the bureaucracy and go to a different country for treatment, but it would take time to arrange it.

* If you already live in the Algarve or other peripheral area, go to Lisbon (or probably Porto) for all your healthcare needs. Portugal is a small country and it would not take much of your time and money to go to Lisbon. After my experience, I would not trust Algarve hospitals with an annual health check-up. And the situation here seems to be deteriorating every month: it is already a catastrophe in public hospitals (someone recently waited 28 hours in the emergency room!), but the availability of the doctors in the private hospitals gets worse too.

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Cautionary tale about the Portuguese healthcare

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