€300M Plan Brings 12,000 Doctors to Portugal’s SNS, Shortening Wait Times

Under a €300M plan to expand full-time positions in Portugal’s SNS, almost 12,000 doctors have signed on in the past year. Authorities say the move is easing patient backlogs and stabilising staff rosters across major hospitals.

Eleven months after Portugal’s health service promised to reward longer hours with higher pay, almost 12,000 physicians have taken the gamble—and taxpayers have now poured more than €300M into the new full-time dedication model. That single figure tells a larger story: the pace of adhesion has doubled in 18 months, the money involved rivals the annual budget of a midsize hospital centre, and the government claims the scheme is finally making the Serviço Nacional de Saúde competitive with the private sector.

One year after the big turn: what the numbers say

Nobody expected the recruitment drive that began on 1 January 2024 to snowball so quickly. By March last year barely 2,860 doctors had opted in. Today the official counter stands at 11,867, a leap that the Minister of Health, Ana Paula Martins, calls “encouraging”. Translated into workforce share, the programme now covers close to half of all hospital specialists and just over one in three family physicians. The growth matters because Portugal still trains fewer doctors per capita than most of Western Europe; losing senior clinicians to private hospitals or to posts abroad has long been a structural risk.

Where the doctors are signing up and why it matters

The map of participation reveals a familiar metropolitan bias. Large urban ULS hubs—Coimbra, São João and São José—house more than 2,100 signatories between them, while rural Trás-os-Montes barely tops a few dozen. Specialities in chronic shortage such as Internal Medicine, Anaesthesiology and Psychiatry now post the highest absolute gains, yet the single biggest block continues to be General and Family Medicine with nearly 4,400 adherents. For patients in Porto, Braga or Lisbon this means shorter waits for routine consultations; for residents of the Alentejo coast the impact is less visible, exposing the decades-old imbalance between coastal and interior districts.

Money on the table: tracking the €300M

The ministry split the cash almost evenly across two fiscal years—€144M in 2024 followed by about €170M up to September this year. Funds do not finance new bricks or machines; they underwrite the 25% salary premium that accompanies a 40-hour working week, the higher overtime ceiling of 250 hours, and the right to roster Saturday clinics. Officials argue that the carrot is cheaper than the stick: filling a single emergency rota with external contractors can cost twice the incremental pay of a full-time specialist. Fiscal watchdogs nonetheless warn that the state must still find room in the 2026 budget for an additional €120M if adhesion rates keep rising.

First signals on patient care

Concrete outcome data remain patchy, but two early indicators hint at progress. First, the average vacancy rate for internal-medicine wards has slipped from 21% to 14% since last spring. Second, the Central Administration for the Health System notes a 10-day cut in median surgical waiting times at hospitals where more than half of consultants enrolled. Researchers at NOVA University caution that causality is not yet proven; elective activity also benefitted from post-pandemic backlog funding. Still, hospital directors interviewed by Público say the scheme has stabilised rosters and reduced reliance on costly agency shifts.

Voices from within the system

Maria Ferreira, a paediatrician at ULS Santa Maria, credits the supplement with allowing her to drop private weekend shifts and focus on public-sector research. Yet the federation FNAM contends that the initiative masks deeper issues: frozen promotions, stagnant hazard pay and the absence of a clear path for senior consultant status. On the political flank, opposition parties agree the €300M has bought breathing space but press for an audit to verify whether the funds trickle down to peripheral hospitals in Beja, Guarda and Portalegre.

What happens next for people in Portugal

In the short term, residents should expect more stable GP appointments in major cities and marginally faster non-urgent surgery. The medium-term stakes are higher. If the ministry secures fresh financing and broadens the scheme to embrace allied health professions, the SNS could regain part of the talent lost to Spain and the Gulf over the past decade. Failure to lock in those resources, experts warn, would risk turning today’s surge into tomorrow’s drain. For now, though, the nearly 12,000 doctors who said yes to full-time dedication have delivered a rare plot twist in the long saga of Portuguese health-care staffing—one that patients from Chaves to Faro will watch closely across the winter.