Portugal's INEM emergency dispatch system OnCall faces criticism over failures

The National Institute of Medical Emergency (INEM) in Portugal launched the new OnCall dispatch platform about a month ago. Pre‑hospital emergency technicians, represented by union leader Rui Lázaro, describe the system as complex, slow and prone to errors. Lázaro said the platform assumes that if one vehicle from an entity is unavailable, all vehicles of that structure are considered unavailable, a flaw that contributed to a fatal incident on 11 July in Guimarães, where a 48‑year‑old man died after an ambulance from a nearer local corps was not dispatched.

INEM president Luís Cabral acknowledged ongoing optimisations to address “specific operational parameters”. The institute’s Workers’ Commission also lodged a formal complaint, citing critical problems in the selection of rescue resources, incident localisation and hospital routing, and the reliance on the PEM portal for vehicle status. The commission demanded answers on system validation, known errors and corrective actions.

Both the union and the Workers’ Commission are pressing INEM for clarification, while the agency maintains that the platform is still being refined.