Brazilians to fill 900 vacancies left by Cuban doctors

In February, Brazilian professionals will fill 900 vacancies formerly filled by Cuban doctors who joined the More Doctors Program. Issued in November, a new announcement have 1,390 vacancies, of which 1,378 will be filled by doctors with professional registration in Brazil. For the first time, in addition to the regular job replacement, there are vacancies previously filled by Cuban professionals, who came to Brazil through a cooperation promoted by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

Since he came into office, Health Minister Ricardo Barros said one of his administration's priorities was to progressively replace Cuban doctors with Brazilians. Currently, of the 18,240 vacancies in the program, 62.6% are filled by Cuban cooperators, 29% by Brazilians trained in Brazil, and 8.4% by foreigners and Brazilians trained abroad.

The Brazilian government aims to replace 4,000 cooperative doctors with Brazilians in three years and, thus, reduce from 11,400 to 7,400 the number of Cuban participants. They expect to have 7,800 Brazilians doctors in the More Doctors, which is more than 40% of the total of professionals.

Remarks

When the More Doctors program was launched in 2013, the massive amount of Cuban doctors was vehemently opposed by Brazilian medical entities. One of the reasons cited by them was that these professionals were not registered in the Brazilian regional councils of medicine. In addition, their wages are paid to the Cuban government that transfers to each professional an amount lower than the one received by other participants of the program.

On the other hand, even though the program has tried to hire mostly Brazilian doctors, most of the vacancies, mainly located in poor and difficult areas like the Indigenous Health Districts, have not attracted the interest of Brazilian doctors. Since 2015, the government has explored new strategies to attract more Brazilians to the program.

Translated by Amarílis Anchieta