Portugal's Family-Doctor Competition Fills 273 of 711 Posts, With the Lisbon Region the Biggest Gap

Portugal's latest recruitment round for family doctors has closed with fewer than four in ten posts filled, underscoring how hard it remains to staff primary care even after years of pay rises and rule changes. Of the 711 vacancies opened across the country, just 273 were taken — a fill rate of about 38% — according to figures the Central Administration of the Health System (Administração Central do Sistema de Saúde, or ACSS) released on Friday.

The Ministry of Health (Ministério da Saúde) had chosen to open every post requested by the country's local health units, hoping to draw in a large cohort of newly qualified specialists. In the end, 246 of the 273 doctors placed were recém-especialistas — freshly certified in general and family medicine (medicina geral e familiar) — representing roughly nine in ten of those who finished their specialty training this year. The ACSS said the competition would assign a family doctor to more than 400,000 patients who currently have none.

The geography of the shortfall is stark. The Lisbon and Tagus Valley region (Lisboa e Vale do Tejo) filled only 113 of 446 posts — about a quarter — leaving the country's most populous health region by far the worst served. The Local Health Unit of the Alentejo Coast (Unidade Local de Saúde do Litoral Alentejano) filled none of its 24 vacancies, while the Tagus Estuary unit (Unidade Local de Saúde do Estuário do Tejo) managed 10 of 35, an improvement on the zero it recorded a year ago. At the other end, the North region (Norte) took up nearly all of its posts, and the Algarve unit reached an 88% occupancy rate in family medicine.

Those numbers land against a backdrop of persistent unmet need. In May, more than 1.6 million people in Portugal had no assigned family doctor, of whom about 1.1 million lived in the Lisbon and Tagus Valley — the same region that has just failed to fill three-quarters of its openings. The mismatch helps explain why successive governments have leaned on emergency-room reforms and higher locum pay to keep services running while the underlying staffing gap endures.

The ACSS framed the result as progress, noting that this year's round placed 42 more family doctors in the National Health Service (Serviço Nacional de Saúde, or SNS) than the equivalent competition in 2025, including gains in the hardest-hit areas. It said the process had made it possible to “strengthen primary healthcare in every region of the country” and to promote “greater equity in access to care.” A parallel competition for public-health doctors (médicos de saúde pública) filled 36 of 68 posts, six more than last year.

Still, the arithmetic is unforgiving: even with every requested vacancy on the table, 438 posts went unclaimed. For the millions of residents on waiting lists — and for the newer arrivals who first discover the family-doctor system when they try to register at a health centre — the practical question is less about this year's headline gain than about how a health service still short of general practitioners plans to close a gap that keeps reappearing, most acutely around the capital. The changes echo recent registry rules that have reshaped who keeps their assigned doctor in the first place.