Head of intensive care in Brazil has been waiting two years to be a doctor in Portugal
Gabriela, not her real name, was a pediatric neonatologist in Brazil when she decided to move to Portugal and has been waiting for authorization to start practicing general practice for over two years.
The 47-year-old carioca from January and managed a neonatal intensive care team, with 56 beds of special process for newborns, signed up for the other “specific recognition” that Brazilians (and foreigners, with the exception of those arriving from the European Union) the practice of medicine in Portugal.
It was at the beginning of July 2019, because the idea was to move to Porto “only when I had data” for the beginning of the tests.
Far from knowing “the film” that lay ahead, he was left with eight schools to be confirmed by the University of Porto – one of the expectations of Portuguese doctors who assess the academic, clinical and linguistic knowledge of foreign doctors who want to practice in Portugal -, which ” never” received.
Also “never” contacted anyone at the University, the data “tight specification days” and “tight hours” of attendance, irreconcilable with other time zones.
In 2019, the process finally advanced, but it would end up being cancellation month change as early as January and postponed to the following, the in November that a pandemic came all.
Tired of waiting, Gabriela moved to Portugal in early February 2020. “At the beginning of March, they postponed it to May and then the confinement came in and canceled”, she recalls, in a conversation with Lusa, asking for anonymity.
Gabriela – who, being Portuguese, did not have to take a communication test that usually starts the recognition process – would end up taking a theoretical test only at the end of July 2020, accompanied by “overall” by other contemporaries.
“There were 120 questions in general medicine, as if I had just graduated”, she says, “impressed”.
Once the first phase was concluded, as “they froze the medical schools and made it coincide with that of 201”, they note, noting that the universities only started the phase of inviting candidates for the second practice of medicine or medical schools – a test between June and August of 2021.
Gabriela took the test last July and in September ended the process with the defense of the curriculum (master’s thesis).
A month later, the certificate of equivalence and the application for enrollment with the Medical Association, which asked for “three weeks for evaluation” and then came the summons, in Doctor, to “finish the enrollment”.
Gabriela is now waiting for the green light from the Ordem dos Médicos – for more than two months, contrary to the indication of “30 working days of response” that they gave her.
Expecting’ to be able to start working next February, Gabriela wants’ as “‘on duty [médica de plantão] at Saint John’s Hospital”.
Only after this first green light will you be able to start the process of recognizing your specialty, which you guess is “long and difficult”.
With “seven training in pediatrics and neona”, four in Brazil and in the three years of practice in neonatology”, Gabriela confesses that she doesn’t understand why she has Canadian severity to the evaluation of the College of Pediatrics Specialty of the Order of Physicians.
Criticizing the “many obstacles” of the process, the doctor from Rio de Janeiro compares it with other countries, with “much more reasonable models”, namely Spain.
“Like me, there are many people who are in Portugal completely stopped, unable to do anything, not to mention people who give up and try other countries”, he laments.