JJPP calls for changes to medical internship vacancy process

The Juventude do Juntos Pelo Povo (JJPP) has joined the Associação Nacional de Estudantes de Medicina and the Sindicato dos Médicos do Norte in raising concerns about the new system for choosing specialist medical internship training vacancies. JJPP has appealed to the Administração Central do Sistema de Saúde to clearly publish the rules and consider changing the competition timetable until outstanding doubts are resolved.

Nino Pereira, a member of the JJPP Political Commission and a final-year medical student, said the previous process was sequential and in real time, allowing each candidate to know which vacancies remained. He said the new asynchronous batch system could require candidates to rank dozens or hundreds of vacancies in advance, depending on batch size and rules that remain unclear.

Pereira said the issue was the design of the process, not digitalisation. He warned that doctors may have to rank vacancies they would never choose to avoid being left without a placement, leaving them to accept an unwanted specialty for five or six years or apply again the following year.

He also said that a vacancy assigned and later refused could leave training capacity unused without an effective way to offer it to another candidate. JJPP said key questions remain over the number of candidates in each batch, the number of vacancies each doctor must rank and what happens to a refused vacancy. It defended a transparent mechanism to make a freed vacancy available to the next candidate who wants it.

For a Madeiran doctor, accepting a mainland vacancy means leaving the Region for four, five or six years, while the reverse applies to those seeking training in SESARAM. Pereira said he will soon go through the process himself and that such decisions affect the future of hundreds of colleagues.

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