SP will pay double hospitals in a joint effort to reduce the queue of surgeries

The Health Department of São Paulo will pay double the SUS table to private hospitals that join the joint effort of surgeries scheduled to begin in June across the state.

The initiative was announced this Wednesday (25) by Governor Rodrigo Garcia (PSDB), a pre-candidate for reelection. The forecast is to serve 75,000 patients per month and normalize the waiting list in up to five months. The investment will be R$ 350 million.

“We are dealing with a side effect of the pandemic”, declared the governor.

According to the Secretary of Health, Jean Gorinchteyn, currently, there are 538,160 patients in the queue for elective surgeries in the state network. The number is the result of the two years in which procedures were suspended to prioritize the treatment of Covid-19 patients.

In addition to the state network, which has the capacity to perform around 25,000 surgical procedures per month, the task force will open a bid to carry out part of the operations in the supplementary network, which includes private and philanthropic hospitals.

The SUS table is a reference of values ​​for more than 4,000 medical procedures, being used as a payment parameter in public contracts in the health area. “The SUS table is outdated and makes hospitals abdicate contracts,” said the governor.

According to Rodrigo Garcia, it took an opinion from the State Attorney’s Office to justify the double payment during the collective effort. “The own network would take two years to clear the queue”, he says.

Own hospitals in the state and municipal networks will expand care for patients awaiting surgery from June 1st. The supplementary network should start serving from July. There is still no information on the number of surgeries to be contracted in the private network.

The waiting list will be regulated by the Cross state system, which will prioritize cases according to urgency.

Secretary Gorinchteyn said that a total of 54 types of surgery will be performed in seven specialties.

A similar initiative took place in 2017, in the first month of the administration of the then mayor João Doria (PSDB), during the Corujão da Saúde program, which promised to eliminate the queue for exams in the public network of the capital of São Paulo. The program used the facilities of the private hospital network from 8 pm to 8 am to end a queue estimated at 417,000 exams at the time.