The proposal was approved at today’s meeting of the deliberative body of the Medical Association (OM) that has the competence to decide on the creation or extinction of specialties and create subspecialties.
A source from the association told Lusa that the new specialty of Emergency and Urgent Care Medicine “has just been voted in favor” at the Assembly of Representatives.
The creation of this specialty had been “rejected” at the end of 2022 by the Assembly of Representatives of the association, but the process was reopened by a working group created at the beginning of this year.
The OM’s objective is to make it possible to start training specialist doctors in Emergency and Urgent Care Medicine as early as January 2025.
With the “green light” given at today’s meeting, an installation commission will be created to visit emergency services to assess which ones have the conditions to receive intern doctors.
Following this work, the Ministry of Health will be informed which emergency services can receive training for the new specialty, so that they can be included in the vacancy map published in November.
The creation of this new specialty is also included in the Government’s Health Emergency and Transformation Plan, with Ana Paula Martins’ ministry intending to open the first vacancies to train specialists in Emergency Medicine as early as next year.
“Given the importance of this measure, efforts are already being made to approve the creation of the Emergency Medical specialty by the end of 2024, so that the first internship vacancies can be made available in 2025,” states the plan approved by the executive at the end of May.
This measure is one of those that the Ministry of Health considers a priority in the “Urgent and Emergency Care” axis of the plan, with the aim of allowing medical specialization in an area of direct impact on the quality of health care provided to patients at risk of life.
In the document, the Government emphasizes that this specialty is “firmly recognized” and already exists in 31 European countries and in about 83 countries worldwide.