Spotlight on Portugal

In October 2008 PRIME joined with AMI, a leading Portuguese NGO, to host an international conference entitled Global Health: Challenges and Opportunities in Africa. Conference speakers included the High Commissioner for Health, the Governor of the province of Sofala in Mozambique, the Vice President of the Portuguese Medical Association, the President of the AMI Foundation and PRIME International Director John Geater MBE. Conference seminars and speakers considered themes including motivating for change, mobilising communities for health empowerment, depression in the developing world, ethical and spiritual issues in HIV/Aids as well as how to stop the brain drain in healthcare.

Dr Jorge Cruz, PRIME Associate Director and leader of PRIME in Portugal, is developing teams of tutors dedicated to sharing resources with Lusophone countries in Africa who are less affluent. Several tutor training conferences have been run in Portugal over the past few years and teaching teams have begun work in various countries.

Dr Jorge Cruz, PRIME Associate Director and leader of PRIME work in Portugal and Lusophone countries writes a regular blog http://falemosdesaude.blogspot.com/

"Initiatives like the PRIME course, which turned out to be a true breath of fresh air, are rare in Portugal. The PRIME course, in my modest opinion, had right from the outset three virtues: the global calling, the multidisciplinary nature and positive bias towards primary, holistic health care. In Portugal we still lack a course on global health during both undergraduate and postgraduate medicine. We learned a lot about what global health is all about, and what it means to work as a professional in an ever increasing global world, besides getting to know the work of an organisation which has carried out an exceptional work in this field. During the three days I personally felt like a fish in water and this was because, as a primary care physician I was pleased for listening to so much discussion on holistic medicine, an approach often forgotten in the world of hospital, hyper-specialised, high-tech medicine." A Portuguese delegate after the conference

2012 is expected to be a very active year for PRIME-Portugal. Several contacts are being made
with our partners in order to have PRIME conferences next year in the cities of Porto and Braga
(North of Portugal), Maputo, Beira or Nampula (Mozambique) and Bissau (Guinea-Bissau). PRIME
has delivered a number of teaching programmes in Portugal focusing on values and whole person
medicine. Portuguese PRIME tutors have already developed and led a programme in Mozambique
and run a very well received conference entitled #Global Health: Challenges and Opportunities in
Africa" in conjunction with a Portuguese NGO, Assistencia Medica International.

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