Brazilian Senator Questions Substitution of Cuban Doctors

Brasilia, Dec 16 .-Brazilian senator Vanesa Grazziotin has described as a mistake the substitution of Cuban professionals for nationals her government is attempting today in the More Doctors program, created in 2013 during the administration of Dilma Rousseff.

 

‘It is not possible to say that this replacement is a success and that almost all the vacancies were filled, as the press reports and the transitional government believes,’ said the Communist Party MP during her speech at the Federal Senate.

According to Grazziotin, the contents of various newspapers indicate that 97 percent of the vacancies opened by convocation, in order to select doctors for the program, have already been fulfilled, but it is really a lie because recruitment still takes place.

She denounced the serious situation of the remote municipalities and in the indigenous communities, which attracts few candidates and whose population is without medical attention after the withdrawal of the Cubans from the program.

The senator noted that in the Amazon, of the more than 320 vacancies left by foreigners, only 228 interested professionals registered and only 22 showed up so far.

Of the seven Indigenous Sanitary Districts of the state, only the largest, that of Manaus, had one interested, she warned.

She pointed out that, of the doctors who showed up, most of them come from the Unified Health System (SUS) itself and they are looking for bigger salaries, and they leave the family health teams of the municipalities of the periphery to work in other cities, and thus disorganize the entire healthcare system.

On November 14, Cuba revalidated the solidarity and humanist vocation shown by its health professionals in dozens of countries, announcing the withdrawal from the More Doctors program in Brazil, in light of the conditions of President-elect Jair Bolsonaro.

‘The peoples of Our America and the rest of the world know that they will always be able to count on the humanistic and solidary vocation of our professionals,’ the Ministry of Public Health of the island said in a statement.

As part of the More Doctors program, the health ministry specifies, in the last five years nearly 20,000 Cuban professionals took care of 113,359,000 patients in some 3,600 municipalities. (Prensa Latina)