AROUND SIX per cent of Portuguese doctors signed up as members of the Portuguese Medical Association (Ordem dos Médicos) in 2007 took their course abroad.
Almost a half graduated in Spain, but these 59 students represented a relatively small number compared to the boom of new doctors getting their certificates abroad.
Now the Ministry of Health, concerned that many of these newly-qualified doctors will either practise abroad or in private hospitals in Portugal, is to provide a range of incentives to attract them to the Portuguese National Health Service (SNS).
Official records show that there have never been so many vacancies for medicine courses in Portugal as there have been this year – 1,614 in all.
But high academic requirements and better salaries abroad often mean that would-be doctors are forced to take their course in countries like Spain or the Czech Republic. It is estimated that the number of graduates that leave Portugal to take their courses abroad is between 100 to 200 doctors a year.
In the Czech Republic, there are 460 Portuguese graduates enrolled on medicine courses, 15 in Brazil while the rest are spread out in countries as near as the United Kingdom and as far away as Venezuela.
The President of the National Association for Medical Students, Cláudia Melo, said that the Ministry of Health was “realising that student doctors were studying abroad because there were opportunities for work there”.
“In countries like the United Kingdom, where there is a lack of doctors, salaries are more attractive,” agrees Rui Guimarães, President of the National Council of Internal Medicine.
Recently, Health Minister Ana Jorge stated that the ministry was trying to identify Portuguese students abroad through embassies in order to attract them back to working in Portugal.
Algarve course
Last month, Prime Minister José Sócrates was at the Algarve University in Faro to announce that a medicine course is to be held for the first time in the region.
The Prime Minister underlined how important this project was to increase the number of doctors in the region, and in the country.
The Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology, Mariano Gago, also mentioned that the “lack of doctors in the last 30 years in Portugal was due to political options” and that “this course will provide more doctors in basic areas of medicine such as the ones oriented to family health”.
With this new course, the Health Minister hopes that many of the health professionals “will want to stay in the region”.
The first doctors to graduate from the new Algarve University course are expected to start working by 2013/2014.
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