Brasilia, Jan 5 (Prensa Latina) The Secretary of Primary Care of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, Nesio Fernandes, affirmed that the More Doctors program, extinct during the administration of the defeated president Jair Bolsonaro, will be resumed.
«The agenda to resume More Doctors is immediate. We want to place doctors in all Brazilian municipalities in a short period of time,» revealed Fernandes, quoted by a local newspaper.
He explained that now the priority will be to hire Brazilians, with registration in the regional councils and offer places to nationals trained abroad. After that, he specified, other positions will be filled by foreigners.
Established in 2013 in the Dilma Rousseff government, Más Médicos set out to increase the number of care professionals, mainly in cities in the interior of the country.
The doctors came from various nations, including Cuba, which revalidated on November 14, 2018 the solidarity and humanist vocation of its health professionals in dozens of countries, by announcing the departure of More Doctors from Brazil, in the face of conditions and derogatory statements from the then elected ruler Bolsonaro over his specialists.
In 2019, the former military president replaced More Doctors with Doctors for Brazil.
However, according to Fernandes, until today, a large part of the vacancies of the Cuban doctors who left the South American giant «have not been filled.»
As part of More Doctors, the Cuban Ministry of Public Health detailed at that time in a statement, in the last five years nearly 20,000 Cuban collaborators attended 113,359,000 patients in some 3,600 municipalities, «reaching coverage for they a universe of up to 60 million Brazilians».
Following the departure of the Caribbean doctors, the current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva Lula thanked the Cuban professionals who participated in the program and for Cuba helping other peoples of the world with its medicine.
«How good it would be if we had, like Cuba, doctors even to export to other countries!», the ex-unionist stated in a letter sent to the Cuban people, following the cessation of his participation in the program.
He assured that the bonds of brotherhood between the peoples of Brazil and Cuba are much stronger than irrational hatred and Cuban professionals «earned the affection and gratitude of millions of Brazilians.» That is why I want to say to the people of Cuba: feel very proud of your doctors and your medical schools. You have won millions of admirers, millions of grateful people in Brazil, the founder of the Workers’ Party stressed on the occasion
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