The “More Doctors” program, which led to the hiring of Cuban doctors to provide services in the poorest regions of Brazilwill be taken over by the government of the president Lula Da Silvaas announced by local authorities.
The Secretary of Primary Care of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, Nésio Fernandes, described as “immediate” the return of said program, canceled by former president Jair Bolsonaro, according to a report from the agency Latin Press (PL).
New government must recover credibility and vanguard of the public health of the country https://t.co/zoglDBK6oM
— Nésio Fernandes (@dr_nesio) January 4, 2023
“We want to place doctors in all Brazilian municipalities in a short period of time,” revealed Fernandes, quoted by a local media.
The official explained that the priority will be for the hiring of Brazilians, with registration in the regional councils and offer places to nationals trained abroad.
Later, other positions will be filled by foreigners, without specifying whether Cuban doctors will be among them.
Established in 2013 in the Government of Dilma Rousseff, Más Médicos set out to increase the number of professionals for care, mainly in cities in the interior of the country, recalls PL.
Thousands of Cuban doctors have participated in the program since its inception, but this ended in November 2018 amid disagreements with Bolsonaro, who created a new plan under the name “Doctors for Brazil.”
Then the MINSAP issued a statement in which it described as “threatening and derogatory” the statements by Bolsonaro, who promised to review the bilateral contract and toughen the conditions for the permanence of Cuban specialists in Brazil.
“The changes announced (by Bolsonaro) impose unacceptable conditions and fail to comply with the guarantees agreed upon since the beginning of the Program, which were ratified in 2016 (…) These unacceptable conditions make it impossible to maintain the presence of Cuban professionals in the Program,” he said at the time. the organism.
As Fernandes now stated, a large part of the vacancies left by Cuban doctors upon their departure from the country “have not been filled.”
According to MINSAP statistics cited by PL, before the end of the “More Doctors” program, some 20,000 Cuban specialists provided services in Brazil.
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These treated 113,359,000 patients in some 3,600 municipalities, “reaching a universe of up to 60 million Brazilians.”
The current president Lula da Silva then thanked the Cuban professionals who participated in the program, and Cuba for helping other peoples of the world with its medicine.
