400 new doctors took the Hippocratic oath. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was present at the ceremony and asked young people for resilience to face the coming years in the SNS. Many of these new doctors want to remain in Portugal, despite the difficulties the services face.
In their hands they carry the lines that will guide them throughout their professional lives. Estela and Ricardo are two of the 400 new doctors who arrive, six years later, at the end of a stage in the long trajectory of medicine.
The President of the Republic appeared by surprise at the Hippocratic oath ceremony, in the Aula Magna of the University of Lisbon. “Not for anything in this world would I lose this oath”, he began by saying, before the bad news.
Marcelo, who had the dream of being a doctor, but ended up a jurist, warned young doctors of what they will find.
“You begin your journey at a time when we are at a crossroads in the National Health Service (SNS) and I give you another bad news: we are around 30 years old. And the most difficult thing is that the structure of the system is not thought out, and is increasingly less thought out, to give time and breathing space to the doctor-person relationship”, adds the head of state.
Not very encouraging prospects that could explain the lack of doctors in the country.
Even without a plan for them to stay here, some of these 400 new doctors now wear the white coat in the new phase: internship. With a sense of mission, they begin their journey in the SNS to fulfill what they swore this weekend.
