About one in four doctors is older than 65, an aging of the class that will result in a wave of about 5,000 retirements by 2030, warns a report on human resources in health released this Tuesday, February 28
"This decade from 2020-2030 will be marked by a high volume of retirements of doctors from the National Health Service (NHS). It is expected that around five thousand doctors will retire in this period, in addition to the retirement of doctors who work exclusively in the private sector," says the document of researchers Pedro Pita Barros and Eduardo Costa.
This report is part of the Chair in Health Economics, framed within the initiative for Social Equity, which results from a partnership between the "la Caixa" Foundation, BPI and the Faculty of Economics, Finance and Management Sciences of the NOVA University of Lisbon (Nova SBE).
The researchers also alert that the "aging problem is asymmetric in the national territory", with the North, Center and autonomous regions registering a "proportion of doctors over 65 years old lower than the national average".
The analysis indicates that, in terms of specialties, the aging of the class is more evident in tropical medicine (88.1% of the doctors over 65), in stomatology (53.8%), in pediatric surgery (43.6%), in clinical pathology (43.1%), in cardiothoracic surgery (42.6%) and in maxillofacial surgery (40.9%).