Family medicine, anesthesia-intensive therapy, pediatrics, infectious diseases, epidemiology, microbiology and public health are, this year, the specialties with the most places allocated for medical residency, with the residency exam that took place on Sunday in six university centers in the country, stated the Minister of Health, Alexandru Rafila.

„Admission to residency must take into account the number of graduates of medical universities, who do not have the medical licence, and the priorities that Romania has in the field of human resources. The allocation of positions for residency took into account these elements and of tuition capacity. (…) It is a transition residency because one of the major reforms that will be implemented through the PNRR [the National Recovery and Resilience Plan] will refer to human resources in healthcare and we want to meet the population’s need for health services. We cannot we train residents for the sake of training, but we train residents so that they can become specialists and be able to provide the population with health services for every specialty that people need. By next year we will have a new approach that will allow the priority development of specialities which are deficient and to seek a stabilization of the medical staff who at the moment lacks specialists in various domains,” said Rafila, on Sunday, at Romexpo, where the residency exam took place.

Minister Rafila emphasized that the professional options of the graduates of the universities of medicine and pharmacy are respected, but the purpose of organizing the residency specialization is „to provide specialists from all the necessary specialties so that they can get to (…) all the localities in Romania”.

„Family medicine always has the most places allocated. There are 700 localities in the country where there is no family physician. 700 localities do not have family physicians and 47 percent of the localities do not have enough family physicians. Family medicine is a complex field, is the answer that every country has to give to health problems, and that doesn’t mean having family doctors, but creating a professional framework for them, on the one hand – the possibility to do investigations, to prescribe treatments. We have, under PNRR, 3,000 family practices to equip, we have over 1,000 evaluated and soon we will sign the first contracts with family physician, so that they can equip their practices. We hope that this step we are taking is stimulating, so that more and more young people opt for this field, which is very important. (…) There must be incentives for family doctors, so that young people also access rural areas, even further away from the city,” Rafila said.

The president of the residency commission, Secretary of State Adriana Pistol, mentioned that 10,330 candidates registered for the national residency exam in the fields of medicine, dentistry and pharmacy in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Craiova, Iasi, Targu Mures and Timisoara.

Medical graduates, from this year and previous years, compete for 5,866 places and positions within the health units subordinated to the Ministry of Health and local public authorities, for the three areas of training: 4,734 places and positions in Medicine, 621 places in Dentistry and 511 places and positions in Pharmacy.

Agerpres