Only 179 Family Doctors Are Due to Retire After This Year, and Their Association Says Every SNS Patient Could Have One by 2029
About 680 GPs will retire by 2029, most of them in 2026, fewer than the doctors now in training. But the USF association says 588 are needed today, and that opening vacancies alone will not fill them.
The worst of the retirement wave among Portugal's family doctors is almost over, and that gives the health service a real chance of giving every registered patient a family doctor by 2029, the national association of Family Health Units (USF-AN) says. But it warns that the numbers alone will not do it.
The association presented its estimates to the Lusa news agency on Thursday, in figures reported by Observador. About 680 general practitioners are expected to retire by 2029, the end of the current legislature. Of those, 503 are expected to go this year. After that, retirements drop sharply, to 179 over the following three years combined. The association says the 680 total is smaller than the number of doctors now training in the specialty.
588 doctors short today
To give every patient registered with the National Health Service (SNS) a family doctor, the country needs 588 more general practitioners now, the USF-AN calculates. It also estimates a shortage of about 280 family nurses and 270 clinical secretaries, the administrative staff who run appointments and records in health centres.
"This is the last year in which we will have many retirements of family doctors. After that, they will be residual numbers, and the number of trainees we are going to train makes it perfectly possible to reach that goal by the end of the legislature, in 2029," said the association's president, André Biscaia. Giving everyone a family doctor, he said, is "the premise for solving all the other problems", from people turning to hospital emergency departments to the control of acute and chronic illness.
"It is not enough to open vacancies"
The association's warning is that statistics will not fill posts on their own. Biscaia called for every vacancy needed to be opened each year, for doctors and the wider family health team alike, and for hiring to be possible throughout the year rather than only in the annual competition, because "often the professionals are not available at the time of the competition".
He also wants patient lists to vary by territory. A doctor in Cascais or Lisbon, where patients live close together, should not carry the same list as one in an area where a home visit means a 50 kilometre drive, he argued. Doctors moving to underserved areas need help with housing, nurseries and schools, and local councils can "make all the difference". "It is not enough to open vacancies, publish the notice and wait for things to happen," he said.
The USF-AN also wants faster approval for new Family Health Units, noting that 23 applications are pending, and easier transfers between local health units (ULS). "Some people may not want to take a vacancy because they think they will never be able to leave," Biscaia said.
What it means for patients
For the many residents, foreign and Portuguese, who are registered at a health centre without an assigned family doctor, the message is cautiously hopeful: the arithmetic is turning in their favour from 2027. Whether that turns into a named doctor depends on how many of the new specialists the SNS manages to hire and keep where the gaps are largest.
