Moratorium on opening medical schools

The Brazilian Medical Association (AMB) expresses its full support for the moratorium decreed by the Ministry of Education, which prohibits the creation of new medical schools in the country for a period of five years. The measure was one of the claims taken by the AMB to the ministry, in meetings held in October. The objective is to solve a serious problem: the poor training of doctors from open medical schools without the minimum conditions necessary for the training of qualified professionals to adequately serve the population. “Training doctors is expensive. Training bad doctors is much more expensive. And for a long time. Poorly trained doctors are more insecure, request unnecessary tests, do not use the appropriate treatments, do not follow the correct protocols, increasing the length of hospitalization of patients and medical intervention without real need. They overload the health system, especially the public, which lacks management mechanisms, make the prevention of injuries precarious and, worse, put the lives of Brazilians at risk”, says Lincoln Ferreira, president of the AMB. “Now it is fundamental that the decree be signed by the President of the Republic, with the agility that the subject deserves”, warns Lincoln. The moratorium on opening new medical schools is an important step towards solving quality problems in training in this area. It is not a demand from the medical profession. It is a demand from all those who study the subject and assess the risks of creating schools without guaranteeing the correct training of their professionals. Other steps need to be taken in the sequence, aiming to guarantee the preparation of good physicians. “We need to cancel the notices issued during the previous government and which are still in progress. They were conceived with the same vices that caused the problems we have seen in several recently inaugurated schools”, evaluates the president of the AMB. It is also essential to resolve the situation of colleges that have opened in recent years and that are operating without the necessary conditions for training competent professionals. These establishments need to be evaluated constantly, as well as their students, in a serious way. For Lincoln Ferreira, “schools that are not operating within a certain quality standard need to suffer sanctions and readjustments”. And he adds: “We cannot allow the existence of first and second class doctors. The population needs to be sure that, if a doctor is trained and has a diploma, he is fully capable of providing care, regardless of where he studied”. This quality control oversight is a longstanding flag of the AMB, including for physicians trained before the indiscriminate opening of new schools. medical education market There are good medical courses inaugurated in recent years, but, in most cases, new medical schools have been created by political or economic interests of some groups and without a strategic vision of serving the population. Cities chosen for this purpose, sometimes very far from a capital, where there are no qualified and qualified doctors even to serve the population, let alone to teach and train other doctors. Classes with inexperienced teachers without the necessary competence will obviously generate unprepared professionals. There are even records of a medical school that had classes transferred to the night period because there was no professor to teach during the day. The physical structure also leaves much to be desired. In several of these schools, there is no university hospital, and agreements are accepted with the public health network (hospitals and other units), entities that do not have a vocation for teaching, revealing an important aspect of medical education: coexistence, oriented from an early age, for real cases. Source: AMB