The More Doctors Program (Programa Mais Médicos-PMM) was established in 2013 because of social pressures, from the Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde-SUS) and population in general. One of its aims is to ensure the provision of medical professionals to work in Primary Healthcare (Atenção Básica-AB) in difficult access areas, due to the insufficiency of these professionals in the SUS. However, on the first calls for participation, Brazilian doctors boycotted the Program. One of the solutions for its implementation was to sign a cooperation agreement between Brazil and Cuba through the Pan American Health Organization. Thus, thousands of Cuban doctors came to Brazil to work on the PMM. However, these professionals’ arrival was widely criticized by medical associations, which affirmed that they didn’t have the necessary training to practice medicine in Brazil. That said, the objective of this study is to analyze the professional training and previous experience of the cooperated physicians participating in the PMM. To do so, we shared data with the multicentric research “Analysis of the effectiveness of the More Doctors initiative in the realization of the universal right to health and in the consolidation of the Health Services Networks”, coordinated by the University of Brasilia. Data was collected using interviews with the cooperative doctors in every regions of the country. We carried out the interviews content analysis and, in addition, we compared the curricula of Cuban and Brazilian medical schools, observing their similarities and differences. Two articles were written from this research. The first article was published in Revista Interface - Comunicação, Saúde, Educação (vol.21, Supplement I, issue 63, 2017, pp. 1257-1268) and is about how the participants understand and are involved in BA in the country. The second article was submitted to the special edition of the Revista Pan-americana de Salud Pública, which theme is “Primary Health Care in the Americas: Forty Years of Alma-Ata”, and its focus is on the qualification of the foreign physicians working in Para. As a result, we observed that Cuban doctors have adequate training in medical practice, once Cuba's medical curricula are, in general, similar to those of Brazil, they all have some postgraduate degree, and in addition they have medical experiences in other countries, due to the internationalist premise of their medical schools. Thus, there is no reason to criticize the training of these professionals, who come from a country recognized for its public health and the way they practice medicine. It is concluded that it is necessary to recognize their technical competence and learn from their humanitarian practice, which has been applied not only to the Cuban population, but also to populations from everywhere in the world where they are needed.
|
