The governor explained that competitions will be opened next week with more than fifty vacancies for newly qualified specialists in General and Family Medicine and 1,070 vacancies for retired doctors.

“When I talk about family doctors, I am talking about around 525 vacancies. All the rest (…) are hospital specialty vacancies,” she said, on the sidelines of the 15th anniversary of the Ministry of Health’s Shared Services (SPMS), in Lisbon.

According to Ana Paula Martins, there is “a large number of doctors” available to stay in the SNS and the notice of the competitions will be published next week.

“When we talk about family doctors, this is what we are talking about: these 525 vacancies plus 93 (…) vacancies in need, in fragile areas. (…) And then we have retired doctors, not all of them stay with us for 40 or 35 hours. They have contracts that are also important contracts and that take care of a significant portion of these users”, she highlighted.

“We will certainly be able, I hope, to make a significant leap in terms of more people having family doctors,” she added.

In the middle of the afternoon today, the Ministry of Health clarified in a note that “between April 2024 and February 2025, there was the registration of 173,970 new users registered in primary health care (APS) and, in this same period, a family doctor was assigned to 175,530 more users”.

The note from the Ministry of Health came after Jornal de Notícias reported yesterday that there were more than 35 thousand users without a family doctor than a year ago.

“In total, 8,951,224 users had a family doctor in February 2025. In the same month, there were 1,565,255 users without a family doctor, 35,900 more users than in the same month in 2024,” she indicated.

The Ministry also added that the number of people registered with the CSP increased, with 121 thousand more people registered in February than in the same month last year.

“We still have a long way to go, the country has a long way to go, the Ministry of Health has a long way to go to ensure that all Portuguese people and those who live among us and who have their life project with us have access to a family health team,” said Ana Paula Martins.

The minister recalled that the records in the National User Registry are always increasing.