In 2018, the Portuguese NHS spent 104,5 million euros on “freelance healthcare professionals” - doctors, nurses, or other kinds of professionals that are not part of the NHS but are hired temporarily.

Even though that was the highest value ever registered, the Portuguese government refused to give the data about who were the biggest winners with this kind of business. So, we decided to find it by ourselves.

I’ve built a scrapper that collected 263.992 contracts made by all hospitals during that time. Then, using NLP, I was able to filter out contracts that were not related to this kind of business, having a final list of 4.987 contracts about this topic.

This allowed me to figure out the biggest winners, but also to find out a case of an anesthesiologist that, according to the public contract, was working around 17 hours a day during a year without any holidays or weekends.