Students see future of Health in Portugal with apprehension
The topic of human resources in Health has been on the front pages of newspapers for several weeks. There is a lack of professionals from different specialties in the Emergency Department, from the north to the south of the country, and hospitals are unable to complete the service rosters. Vacations, due to illness or difficulties in, retaining doctors, nurses, assistants and other professionals are uncovering again one that is not of today. How do students see this scenario that, without urgency, they will have to face when they finish their training? What options are ahead? Constança Nunes, a nursing student at the Lisbon School of Nursing of the Institute of Health Sciences (ICS), of the Portuguese Catholic University, and Vasco Cremon de Lemos, a medical student at the Nova Medical School, of the Nova University of Lisbon, share their vision of the problem in yet another Transforming the SNS podcast, which you can see and hear in full on the Diário de Notícias website. The two students are also the authors of another thesis within the scope of the project that joined the DN to the Health Foundation – SNS, this time on Health Professions.
In conversation with Diário de Notícias, Constança and Vasco confess that it is with apprehension that they look at the current panorama of Health and the future that awaits them. “We are being trained with the aim of taking care of people and this is not happening”, says the Nursing student (FNAEE).
“It is very worrying and we see everything with great concern”, adds the student of the National Association of Medicine and vice-president of the National Association of Medicine (ANEM), who registers an unpredictable situation, but which reflects the warnings that ANEM has given us last years. “It reflects a lack of importance, in fact, a lack of health and that we are having so much difficulty having health professionals on stopovers, only reflecting the lack of ours”.
But, from the students’ perspective, is there a lack of doctors in the SNS or not? “There is a lack of specialist doctors”, says Vasco Cremon de Lemos. Because? “Only after the internship is a specialist that we are specialist doctors and a medical career is mandatory. A doctor who does not have a specialization entry cannot access a medical career”, he explains.
We cannot demand any professional health care if not the conditions to work
And here’s the problem. According to the future, what is based on doctors and works in Portugal the SNS is mainly based on specialists, which often, many times, is so specialized in medicine that, often, it is not as specialized as other doctors are so specialists like other doctors are just as specialized as others.
“And they are specialist doctors that they say are lacking in the SNS”, Vasco Lemos. “Here, the problems already involve access to this specialty, because when we think that we have more doctors entering the contest than doctors being able to enter the specialty, we have fun”. There are doctors, guarantees the student, who cannot access the specialty and who repeat the test year after year.
In the area of Nursing, the problems are similar. The first step in the career is, for two years, working as a general care nurse and only then is it possible to invest in the specialty. According to Constança Nunes, the problem is not accessible to the profession, but the lack of generalized working conditions.
“We can’t demand any health professional an excellent care if not the conditions to work”. How is it possible to take care of someone if the profession is not valued, asks the future nurse. And, in her opinion, this is the main factor that drives people to emigrate. “It is subtitled to think that we have such a good and qualified training, but that our country is not used to advantage”, reinforces”,
At ANEM, a recent study carried out with medical students concluded that more than half consider emigration as a necessity, more than because they want this experience. The solution to these problems, reiterates Vasco Cremon de Lemos, involves the human resources system. “Planning human resources is also planning the conditions of people and health professionals”, he argues.
The first step would be, from the perspective of the vice president of ANEM, to make the national inventory of health professionals, a structure that has been defined in law since 2015, but which after seven years remains only on paper.
See the video of the debate above.