On 13 June, newspaper Diário de Notícias published an article about the final year medical students who, in year 6, and due to the new coronavirus, had part of their internships cancelled. This is the case of Catarina Nunes, a FMUL student, who was part of the general surgery service at Professor Fernando da Fonseca Hospital.

Catarina had her final internship, scheduled to end in June, cancelled, and the practical component was replaced by classes taught via videoconference, where each clinical case was discussed. According to Catarina, as stated in Diário de Notícias, these classes “were very useful, to the point of advising that they should be maintained even after the pandemic is overcome.” “But the experience in the hospital is the experience in the hospital. And it is not replaceable. It is necessary to see patients, touch them to feel their pain and act as a shadow for the elderly, with whom students are learning.”

Mar Mateus, a final year student at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Minho, for her part "does not feel as impaired in her training as other colleagues, because she managed to do an internship" in Internal Medicine, which according to her, is a part of medicine that is "more generalist and most encourages clinical reasoning".

In this article, we can also read the experience of José Durão, who started the common year of the specialty in the teams to fight the new coronavirus, at Santarém Hospital. “I called people flagged as having been in contact with a covid patient and asked them where they had been, with whom, for how long, among other information that would help to trace a path. This account later enabled isolating the maximum number of citizens suspected of being able to transmit covid and to control transmission chains, preventing the disease from continuing to circulate”, he says. But he also shared the experience of his colleagues "who have been carrying out  surgery internship for more than two months and who never participated in an surgery or who did not have an emergency". Francisco Rocha, doctor at the Central Lisbon Health Centre Group (ACES), had a similar experience, stating that the work conducted “surely saved hundreds or thousands of people".

Read the full article here.