Brazil wants to resume the Mais Medicos program as soon as possible, but collaboration with Cuba, at least as a priority, is up in the air. The Secretary of Primary Care of the Ministry of Health, Nésio Fernandes, said In an interview published this wednesday by Folha de Sao Paulo that priority will be given to Brazilian professionals.
“The agenda to resume More Doctors it is immediate. We want to place doctors in all Brazilian municipalities in a short period of time,” he explained. In the absence of more details, the program, this time, will consist of trying to cover the demand with health workers registered in the regional councils. In the case of not achieve it, the following would be Brazilians trained abroad and foreigners.
What is not foreseen, he maintained, is “to repeat the collaboration with Cuba in the previous forms, with the participation of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO, the Latin American arm of the WHO).”
The Mais Medicos program was launched in 2013 by then-president Dilma Rousseff with the aim of attracting professionals to rural areas, which suffered from a lack of medical assistance. The positions had to be filled with local and foreign personnel, for which workers from different countries signed up as volunteers.
However, the Cubans were sent in a “package” within a collaboration scheme with PAHO and ended up being the largest group by far. In its five years of operation, more than 20,000 professionals from the Island attended 113.3 million Brazilian patients, according to official data.
In 2018, and before assuming the presidency, Jair Bolsonaro stated on numerous occasions his intention to cancel the agreements with Cuba, which he considered a way of injecting money into the island’s regime in exchange for doctors who, on occasions, lacked professionalism. . The then president proposed making direct and individualized contracts.
Faced with the imminent rupture, Cuba went ahead announcing that it was abandoning the mission. At that time there were more than 8,000 Cuban doctors in the country, out of a total of 18,240 posts that made it up. From them, 2,500 decided to “desert” and stay in Brazil and even tried to apply for the new positions.
To take advantage of this offer, Brazil decreed a provisional measure, consolidated as law, by which Cubans were incorporated into the Bolsonaro program if they passed an exam known as revalidation. After passing it, they could request a license to work throughout the national territory.
The agreement with Cuba in Rousseff’s time, according to the Brazilian press, divided the remuneration, which at that time was 12,000 reais (about $2,200), into three parts. 70% went to the Cuban State, 5% to PAHO and the remaining 25% to the workers.
President Bolsonaro introduced a plan known as Medicos pelo Brasil which, according to Nésio Fernandes, “has failed” and keeps municipalities in the interior and peripheral areas without assistance.
In november, the senator of the Workers’ Party (then in opposition and now in power with Lula da Silva) Humberto Costa told the Brazilian press that the new Mais Medicos will change from its previous format. “We want a project, a program that has the principles of Mais Médicos, to ensure that these medical care gaps can be covered. Now, the design that we are going to do, will still be built, because today there are a significant number of doctors “, he exposed.
“There are doctors who graduated abroad and have not yet been revalidated, there are Cuban doctors who stayed in Brazil and there are doctors who graduated and are not being absorbed by the job market. So, a similar program could be implemented, but with a predominance of Brazilians,” he added.
The official Cuban press has received the news with joy, although has avoided including in the note the express mention that an agreement like the previous one is not foreseen. Perhaps because Havana wants to maintain discretion for the moment about a future lucrative agreement with the Comercializadora de Servicios Médicos Cubanos.
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