The Federation of Public Health Officials denounced changes in the care model of the Yellow Portal that works with people with addiction problems. According to Patricia Jaurena, president of the Internal Portal Commission, the new model “affects” outpatients and leaves them “totally” unprotected, especially those who do not have a support network or have scarce resources.
With these changes, “users will be referred and geo-referenced to the nearest polyclinics, where, as Jaurena explained, “continuous and multidisciplinary care is not provided” that is provided on the Portal.
“The user in the Yellow Portal had a full team containment for him. Georeferencing in polyclinics do not have this staff. In addition, in the Yellow Portal they were given proximity to the center through tickets when the economy was not enough to sustain them and that also generated continuity in the service and attention, “said Jaurena.
On the other hand, he pointed out that in the polyclinics this help is not provided in the transfer, nor does the user have “containment and continuity in treatment.”
“They are given an agenda with three months or more and what this generates is that the street user, the user who does not have containment, does not continue and they lose it. There is no monitoring of the situation in which he is, while in the Portal there was by the social workers”, indicated the President of the Internal Commission.
The officials also claim that they were not consulted or taken into account when making these changes. “The Portal workers never accessed the project. We were always told that they were constantly changing, that is why they had not been shown to us, “said Jaurena and clarified that what there was was a” verbal approach “of what was going to be the installation of the detoxification rooms within the unit and the extension of hours for hospitalization.
“We could not have participation in the project. What we were able to do was convey to the management and in the bipartisan meetings our concern about how the care of the outpatient user would be protected and sustained, since they will no longer be in our center,” Jaurena said.
He stated that workers there still do not know how the center will function after these proposed changes. “There are no previously established operating protocols; They don’t even know how to tell us how we are going to work in nursing, if it is going to work jointly within the center, in the detoxification area or in the residential area, or if they are going to be two separate multidisciplinary teams,” adding that they are working “with many doubts and insecurity” and with “little or almost no information”.
Regarding the hospitalization of patients, he said that with the proposed modifications care will be extended until 8:00 p.m., but this, according to Jaurena, “will bring problems since the center is not prepared for it.”
“Today hospitalizations are from Monday to Friday, normally in the morning. Now we are going to have the doors open until 8 at night and this hospitalization can be at any time. We have had episodes, which we have manifested in the bipartisan sphere, in which users have come accompanied by police officers to want to admit or admit them, or they have come alone on weekends or after hours and situations have become quite complicated in terms of nervousness and violence that our center is not prepared for it, since we do not have a containment measure, nor an environment that protects us, ”said the President of the Portal base Union.
For his part, Martín Pereira, president of the FFSP, assured that they “view with concern” the fact that the center’s workers have not been taken into account, “who have years of experience working with the issue of addictions.”
“In such an important issue, for which the government is allocating funds in this Accountability, not taking into account the opinion of the workers seems to us a serious mistake on the part of the management team of the Yellow Portal. This is how we are going to communicate it to the ASSE authorities, with the objective of having the areas so that the workers can give their opinion regarding the new service model that they want to implement in the Portal”, expressed Pereira.
Noelia Franco agency report
