Citizen Stores reopen on June 1 for face-to-face service by appointment, with the exception of those located in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. As for these stores, the decision will be reassessed on June 4.
After the implementation of measures to contain the risk of contagion at Covid-19, which forced the closure of the Stores, it is now possible and safe to resume face-to-face service in most of these spaces. Thus, only the following stores are closed: Laranjeiras, Saldanha, Marvila, Cascais, Cacém, Setúbal, Odivelas, Mafra and Pinhal Novo and Pinhal Novo Móvel. Schedules scheduled for these locations will be rescheduled at the initiative of the services
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In the remaining stores, the current context requires services to be resumed gradually, adopting measures that guarantee the protection of workers and users. Therefore, Citizen Stores will only open for pre-booking and with rules for maximum capacity (1 person per 20 m2), mandatory use of a mask and availability of alcohol-gel dispensers for hand hygiene.
In order to avoid clusters in the Stores, it will not be possible to resume spontaneous service, so people should only go to these spaces when they have confirmation of the appointment by the service they want. Appointments can be made through the telephone lines of the respective services, the citizen contact centers (300 003 990) and the company (300 003 980) or online on the ePortugal portal.
1,000 acrylic barriers were installed in the 34 Stores managed by the Agency for Administrative Modernization (AMA) and 1,500 in the Citizen Stores and Spaces managed by the municipalities, which were able to count on the technical and financial support of the central administration in this adaptation. In the spaces there are also signs that alert to the need to respect the safety rules, namely the physical distance between people.
The workers will wear masks and, with regard to internal organization, there will be teams working in shifts (with different schedules) to guarantee a smaller concentration of people in the same space. Documents and videos with general guidelines on hygiene and safety rules to be adopted were released. However, it will be up to each service to define the modalities that best suit their needs.
To reinforce face-to-face service, Citizen Kiosks – temporary branches – were created in the municipalities where a greater need for response was identified.
There are currently five Citizen Kiosks for the delivery of the Citizen Card – Sintra / Cacém, Coimbra, Gaia, Faro and Odivelas – and another one will soon open for services related to the Institute of Mobility and Transport (IMT), in Lisbon. These temporary branches are the result of a partnership between AMA, municipalities and State services, such as the Institute of Registration and Notaries (IRN) or IMT, in order to bring public services closer to the citizen.
An extension of the validity of personal documents until October 30 was also announced, allowing people more time to renew the documents and allowing services to also accommodate appointments.
Alongside these measures, the use of public online services will continue to be promoted through communication campaigns and strengthening the response. As a result of the current situation, there has been an exponential increase in visits to the ePortugal portal, which is the gateway to hundreds of public services. Between mid-March (when the President of the Republic declared a state of emergency) and May 22, there were about 200 thousand new adhesions to the Digital Mobile Key. Of the more than 1.5 million keys in existence, more than 1 million are active, that is, they have been effectively used to access digital services.