Brazil Mais Medicos Program

A Brazilian federal program, launched on 8 July 2013 under President Dilma Rousseff, that placed doctors in remote areas and poor urban peripheries suffering physician shortages as a short-term bridge while the country expanded its own medical training capacity. Mais Medicos, meaning More Doctors, deployed 15,000 doctors at launch and grew to 18,240 by 2017, serving some 63 million people across 4,058 locations; only about 45.6 percent of participating doctors were Brazilian, with the rest drawn mainly from Cuba along with Portugal, Argentina and Spain, and each doctor received a monthly stipend of 10,000 reais plus housing and food allowances. Cuban doctors took part under contracts mediated by the Pan American Health Organization, an arrangement Brazil's medical associations challenged in court on the grounds that hiring foreign-trained physicians without a diploma revalidation exam bypassed the regional medical councils' authority to assess professional quality; Cuba withdrew its roughly 8,556 participating doctors in November 2018 after Jair Bolsonaro's election over his proposed changes to the arrangement, and President Lula relaunched the program in March 2023 with a plan to reach 28,000 total positions by the end of that year, this time prioritizing Brazilian medical professionals.