Resumption of “Mais Médico” is very urgent, says Secretary of Primary Care

Among the priorities of basic health care, taking doctors to cities without services is considered “an extremely urgent matter”, according to the secretary of Primary Health Care of the Ministry of Health, Nesio Fernandes .

For this reason, the Lula government will resume the Mais Médicos program, created during the Dilma Rousseff government in 2013, extinguished by Jair Bolsonaro six years later.

In an interview with CNN by telephone, the secretary said that the program can rehire foreign doctors who stayed in the country after 2019, especially Cubans, but this would be the third possibility of hiring by the program.

“According to the debates so far, there would not be a specific notice by nationality or agreement with countries. It would be a direct contract between the person and the program.”

The resumption of Mais Médicos is considered essential because the program has consolidated legislation and an administrative selection procedure.

The first step would be to hire physicians registered in Brazil or foreigners with an approved revalidation exam. The second step would serve Brazilians trained abroad without revalidation. And the third stage, foreigners without the “Revalida”.

“This rite is already pacified with labor courts and control bodies and even among the medical societies themselves. With this legal framework and mature administrative process, we managed to place doctors in all cities in Brazil”.

Data collected by the transition team show that among the 5,568 municipalities, there are 300 without doctors for over a year; 800 cities that cannot hire doctors, in addition to 1,200 that have a high turnover of health professionals.

Nésio Fernandes says that this data will be consolidated in two weeks for formatting the program. “To this day, municipalities that had Cuban doctors, who left because of the diplomatic crisis in 2019, are without doctors”.

Vaccination

In the emergency agenda, President Lula has already ordered the immediate resumption of vaccination to achieve protection coverage, especially for children.
“The application takes place in primary care. And that in the first hundred days we will have major mobilization campaigns for Covid and routine vaccines ”.

In one of the first meetings with the health transition group, Lula stated that “those who fight the vaccine will have to apologize”.

In this line, the Secretary of Primary Care stated that vaccination campaigns face a scenario of denialism, fueled by the Jair Bolsonaro government and social networks. And therefore, medical and educational measures will be necessary, but also judicial ones must also be studied.

“In a polarized country, we are indeed facing a context that will demand not only campaigns, it will demand supply, active search for patients and also the accountability of people who spread lies against public health”, he concluded.

multidisciplinary primary care

According to the Secretary, another request from President Lula is to guarantee the population access to services during the period in which they need them.

The team’s diagnosis so far is that in the pandemic there was a damming of medium and high complexity procedures, but also of primary care procedures that need to be recomposed. Among them, oral health.

One of the projects is to resume and implement the Family Health Support Center (NASF) in the cities, a program created in 2008 with multidisciplinary teams.

The program intends to be the first specialized access, in an intermediation between basic care and more complex services.

During the Bolsonaro government, the Ministry of Health withdrew specific funding for the program. According to Fernandes, in municipalities with fiscal tightening and economic crisis, this resource was used to finance the minimum basic health team with doctors, nurses, dentists and health agents, which reduced the hiring of psychologists and social workers.

“These teams can be reformulated with the support of telemedicine. The NASF must guarantee access to specialized care for people with chronic and post-COVID conditions,” he guaranteed.