Doctors, universities reject government’s new courses

Portugal Resident 11 September 2021

A major row has ensued since Manuel Heitor, Portugal’s minister in charge of higher education, announced the opening of three extra university courses in medicine, to start within the next two years, writes Natasha Donn for Portugal Resident.

In an interview with Diário de Notícias, the minister explained that “in Portugal all doctors are trained in the same way” when perhaps this is unnecessary. “The point is that to train an experienced family doctor it is not necessary, perhaps, to have the same level and duration of teaching as a specialist in oncology, or a specialist in mental health,” he told DN.

Miguel Guimarães of the General Medical Council stressed that the course in medicine is “completely independent of postgraduate training”. In other words, “it has to stay as it is, as it is the world over. If we kill the holistic vision of medicine, we are killing medicine in itself, so we have to defend medicine. We cannot let the minister think that medicine can be broken up so that some have a complete course, and others half a course, etc etc…”
Full report on the Portugal Resident site

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